Translating the Web into Xhosa (and Zulu)
Heather and Dwayne Bailey are helping build an internet for all
What if you were a speaker of Xhosa, one of South Africa’s 12 languages, and needed to search the Web? Simple: you could use Firefox in Xhosa — or Tswana, or Zulu. Thanks to Heather and Dwayne Bailey and their nonprofit Translate.org.za, countless non-English speakers around the world can use software in their native tongue — a option that just 15 years ago was unimaginable.
So, how did a former fashion buyer and a former mechanical engineer end up as leaders in a digital inclusivity movement?
“I don’t think we stopped to think,” Heather says. The couple’s joint passion for localization was ignited in 2001, when they found themselves trying to help Xhosa-speaking friends in Cape Town negotiate the Web. Why, they wondered, should you have to speak English to use the Internet?
As they worked with a local Xhosa teacher to translate Firefox, the impact of their work became more and more apparent. In time, Heather and Dwayne came to understand that their efforts were building a more inclusive Web. “Inclusivity opens up the world,” Heather says.
The Baileys and Mozilla are a natural pair. “We chose to translate Firefox because it was open,” Heather explains. Open source software meant they didn’t have to ask for permission to do the right thing. By 2008, a more formal relationship emerged: Mozilla awarded Translate a grant to improve Pootle, its Web-based translation tool, making it more accessible to users without a technical background.
Mozilla is now a key source of support and friendship for Heather and Dwayne, and while they’ve always enjoyed hanging out with fellow localizers at MozFest, the most recent 2015 festival marked their first foray into hosting workshops. It’s was a family affair: their daughters Jessica (11) and Philippa (13) pitched in to lead art projects for junior localizers.
The challenges of a world with 7,000 languages are myriad. Dwayne and Heather find themselves tackling issues like coding in dextrosinistral scripts (languages written right to left, like Arabic and Hebrew), or designing keyboards for writing systems that look nothing like the Latin alphabet.
And there’s still work to be done. With 200 languages hosted so far, “we’re hardly scratching the surface,” Heather says. But they’re not stopping anytime soon.
