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The PanAfrican Localisation (PAL or PanAfriL10n) project was the predecessor to the African Network for Localisation (ANLoc) - both receiving funding from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada. The 100 African Language Locales initiative is one of several subprojects of ANLoc. PAL ran from April 2005 through March of this year, and served networking, research, and information resource building roles. I led that effort. ANLoc began thereafter and is generally more technical in focus with outputs anticipated in several areas: locales,; fonts (expansion of open-source fonts to include extended Latin characters used in many African language orthographies - it is not dealing with non-Latin scripts at this time); keyboard layouts (to facilitate input in diverse orthographies - not so simple if one is anticipating multilingual users and coverage of multiple languages in a given layout); terminologies for seleted languages; spell checkers for selected languages; tools to facilitate localization of software; training; research on policy that affects localization (I am leading this effort); and some small projects. ANLoc is being coordinated by a South African NGO, Translate.org.za, which has been a leader in open-source localization not only in Africa but worldwide. It is planned that the wiki built at http://www.PanAfriL10n.org/ will be incorporated into the ANLoc site at http://www.africanlocalisation.net/ site, though the details of this are still under discussion. IDRC, as many readers of this list would be aware, has had a long history of innovation with regard to ICT in Africa. Its active facilitation of these localization efforts are another example of their forward-looking approach. Don Osborn
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