Making local lekker - promoting your content in South African languages
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the song you had written in your mother tongue, Zulu, could be distributed with a license written in the same language? Creative Commons South Africa and Translate.org.za recently announced the availability of licenses in Afrikaans, isiZulu and Sesotho sa Leboa.
Says, Dwayne Bailey of Translate.org.za, “For us this was a natural extension of what we do. We use the Creative Commons licenses on some of our works, so it made sense that if we could translate the license, we should.” And they did. The result for Translate.org.za is that when people use their software and website site in Afrikaans they can also see the licenses in Afrikaans. For most South Africans it means that a blog in Sesotho sa Leboa can point to a license in that language, instead of to an English license. This will stimulate and support mother-tongue content.
The process of using a translated license is simple - users go to http://creativecommons.org/license
Here is an example of the Attribution ShareAlike license in Zulu http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.zu
The process of creating the translations involved more consultation and meetings than one would imagine. Translate.org.za translators and Creative Commons legal experts met for the translators to be educated around the purpose of the licenses and the terms used. The translators created and discussed terms for words such as ShareAlike and non-Commercial ~ all words that needed to tightly align with the English equivalent. The translators translated, reviewed and corrected the licenses. The translations were in beta for approximately two months as translators reviewed the work and assessed accuracy of terminology.
The team at Creative Commons South Africa is thrilled with the result. “This was a real team effort and we’re looking forward to working with Translate.org.za in the future to translate the licence into more languages and to look at translating more free content into our local languages.”