What a wonderful project! I just heard from Alberto Escudero who is working on a Swahili IT glossary in Tanzania licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. The content is great, but the methodology is even better, engaging a wide range of Kiswahili experts, computer scientists and now, volunteers in developing tech terms for the local community. This advice to the volunteer ‘graders’ of the glossary is particularly interesting:

‘We are aware that words can sound very funny when you are not used to them - this is normal. Just try to grade the words as if they are good options to “adapt” the English to Kiswahili. Problably the first time that someone used the word “mouse” in the computer sense many people also smiled at him or her. Kiswahili has a rich grammar that allows the creation of new terms in different ways that the English does. Most of Kiswahili speakers are not aware of that, finding the correspondent IT terms in Kiswahili is not more difficult that in any other language.’

Great work, klnX!

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