South Africa based translate.org.za has created a Luganda version plugin for the Mozilla Firefox 3 web browser. This special addition to the Firefox 3 browser was developed in partnership with Makerere University and Rhodes University. Over 200 Makerere students participated in a “Translate@athon” working on translating different aspects of Firefox 3 into Luganda during the first week of August.

Translate@thons are the creation of translate.org.za which is a non-profit organisation producing Free and Open Source software that enables and empowers South Africans. The Translate Project started in 2001 with the vision of providing Free and Open Source Software translated into the 11 official languages of South Africa.

Researchers at Rhodes University conceived of the idea to apply the translation service to Luganda. The role of Makerere students was to use a special web-based tool called Pootle which allowed as many 200 students to simultaneously translate English into Luganda. After translating the words and phrases same tool allowed them to rapidly correct technical and language errors.

A computer expert, who Buganda Post spoke to in Kampala, said that the Luganda browser shows a lot of promise but much work still needs to be done. The initial (beta) version can be found at http://translate.org.za/content/view/1817/51/.