Recipient Institution:
Open Forum for Cambodia

P.O.Box 177 Phnom Penh Cambodia

Tel/Fax: 855 12 415 734/855 23 360 345

Email: javier@khmeros.info

Project Leader:
Mr. Javier Solá

Amount and Duration: US$ 29,732 / 24 months

Commencement Date:
May 2004

Abstract of Project
In order to enter a digital world without forfeiting its culture, a country must do it by using software in its own language. Software in a foreign language exacerbates the digital divide, makes basic computers training difficult and expensive, impoverishes local culture, and blocks computer-based government processes, as local language scripts cannot be used in databases.

The Open Source movement provides all the applications needed to create a full computer system, and facilitates translation (localization) to many languages, nevertheless, figuring out how to develop a localization project -for those not involved in Open Source- is a long and painful learning process which is repeated once again by every localization project in every country. As the expertise acquired by each one of these countries or projects is not written, it is lost. New projects have to start from zero.

Several countries in the Asia/Pacific region are at this time considering starting localization projects, but given the size and industrialization level of the countries, they lack the human resources to start these projects without outside expert advice.
This project proposes the development of a plain-language Toolkit that will allow Asia/Pacific countries (that do not have computer systems in their own language) to develop localization projects without the need of specialized help.

The Toolkit will be developed along the next two years, but several preliminary releases will be made public before. It will be tested by the Khmer Software Initiative, a Cambodian localization project, as well as another localization project if possible.