Welsh Language Board launches guidelines for developers

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Welsh Language Board launches guidelines for developers
By Kevin Donnelly | 13 Apr 2006


Last week, at its new outreach office in Ruthin, the Welsh Language Board
launched what it hopes will be a major step towards securing the place of
Welsh in the fast-developing IT arena. Two documents, the result of a
year-long consultation, were introduced by the WLB's chief executive,
Meirion Prys Jones. The first, Information Technology and the Welsh
Language: a Strategy Document [pdf], sets out policy statements which will
govern the WLB's approach to this area over the next few years, as well as
broad targets for what it hopes to achieve.

A key area of policy is localisation, and Dr Jeremy Evas, the WLB's head
of research, noted that a great deal had been done here over the last two
years he referred to translations of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft
Office, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, the Linux GNOME and KDE desktops, and
ongoing work on Mac OS X. However, the aim of increasing the standing of
Welsh in the field of IT is broader, and includes, for instance, bilingual
website design, lexical tools such as spelling and grammar checkers, the
development of appropriate terminology, end-user training through the
medium of Welsh, and longer-term projects such as machine translation and
speech recognition systems.

The second document, Bilingual Software Guidelines and Standards [pdf] is
a counterpart to the strategy document, and sets out recommended
approaches to more technical issues. It gives guidance on such things as
character sets, the reconciliation of bilingual data, searching, and so
on. Dr Evas stressed that the documents would be the subject of ongoing
revision as the policy developed, and extended an open invitation for
constructive suggestions to the WLB in this regard. Last year, the WLB
officially launched Vocab, a web application which provides English
translations of Welsh words via mouse rollover. Developed by BBC Wales's
new media department in partnership with the WLB, the application has been
adopted by numerous Welsh language websites. Click here to see Vocab in
action.

Kevin Donnelly heads up Kywaith Kyfieithu, a community project translating
the Gnome and KDE Linux distributions into Welsh.


http://www.pingwales.co.uk/2006/04/13/WLB.html