Facebook in your language?

[Kevin Scannell]

Hi everyone,

  I'm sure many of you remember Neskie Manuel who used to be a member
of this list before his tragic passing last year.  Neskie had a great
software project underway called "secwepemc-facebook".  Like all of
his projects it was open source, and so you can read his description
on github, here:

https://github.com/neskie/secwepemc-facebook

   In short, it involves some clever JavaScript to allow Facebook to
be translated into his language of Secwepemctsín, despite the fact
that it isn't one of the 100 or so languages supported by the site.  I
think this is a game-changing idea for indigenous languages - with
Neskie's approach there's no need to "ask permission" or have some
engineer flip a switch on a remote server to allow you to start
translating a web site.

  A couple of days ago I finished a rewrite of Neskie's code to work
with the new Facebook design, and generalized so that it should now
work with any language (although I'm not sure about RTL scripts yet).
The response has been great in just the last two days - 6 languages
have complete translations already: Haitian Creole, Nawat (< 100
speakers), Chichewa, Kriol (Australia), Hiligaynon, and Scottish
Gaelic.  5 more are underway.  If you're interested, please send me a
message off list and I can provide more details on how to do this for
your language.   We're not aiming at complete translations - right now
just 125 or so of the most common navigation elements, so "most" of
what you see should be translated.

Míle buíochas/thanks

Kevin