Softcatalà
Softcatalà is a
History
Softcatalà was born in 1997 as a group of volunteers with the aim of improving the presence of Catalan in new technologies. The first step was to translate the most important free and/or open-source software based programs (OpenOffice.org, Firefox, etc.) into Catalan. After that, they delivered some other projects, including the following ones:
- 1,500 English-Catalan words glossary for software translation.
- Software translation style guide[1]
- Translation memory with more than 40,000 entries (including translations made by Softcatalà)
- Spell-checker[2]
Collaborations
During this last years, Softcatalà has collaborated with the terminology centre TERMCAT standardizing new Catalan terms related to new technologies.
In 2001, they started collaborating with Google, and that permitted the translation of the interface and later, the participation in the adaptation of the search engine related to Catalan pages. They have also worked on the popularization of
Web-page
The main Internet site for Softcatalà is only available in Catalan. It offers all the information about the group and explains its reasons and objectives. The web page consists of six different sections:
- Pantry: Links to software resources organized in different sections (Internet, multimedia, image, language…) for Mac.
- Forums: Forums focused on solving doubts related to the language used by programmers.
- Spell-checker: On-line spell-checker available in general Catalan and also in Valencian. It only corrects orthographic mistakes.
- Translator: to Catalan and vice versa).
- Lists: some mail lists belonging to llistes.softcatala.org.
- Projects: Projects in which Softcatalà is involved, including OpenOffice.org, Ubuntu, Open Thesaurus-ca…
References
- ^ Member of Softcatalà becomes the new translation coordinator of Ubuntu (catalan) 08/04/2009 VilaWeb (in catalan)
- ^ Softcatalà uploads the first on-line Catalan spell-checker (spanish)[permanent dead link] 12/09/2006 Diario de Mallorca