Metaglossia: The Translation World

Google has ramped up its operations significantly in sub-Saharan Africa over the past few years and currently has offices in six countries across the region.

Joseph Mucheru, Google Kenya country manager
Some of the services Google has rolled out in the region include: the Google Apps Supporting Programs (GASP), which facilitate online learning through Google; Wazi WiFi in Kenya that provides high-speed wireless internet at a low-cost; and a TV White Spaces pilot in South Africa, which covers large areas with broadband.
In addition, YouTube is available in a number of African languages such as East Africa’s Swahili, Ethiopia’s Amharic and South Africa’s IsiZulu and Afrikaans. Google has even launched a virtual Amharic keyboard which allows Ethiopians to search for and upload videos containing Ethiopic text, eliminating a real barrier to broadcasting themselves.
Google Trader, a free classifieds service that allows users to buy and sell products and search for jobs, has been launched in a number of African countries. Users without internet access can also post items and search for deals by sending an SMS to a special short code.
Others Google services include the recently launched Gmail SMS, Maps and Google+ in Swahili, Amharic, Afrikaans and IsiZulu. Google Baraza (which means “council” in Swahili) allows people in countries across the continent to share knowledge with each other by asking questions and posting answers.
Google country manager for Kenya, Joseph Mucheru, told How we made it in Africa that the technology giant is serious about Africa, and its strategy is to get users online by developing an accessible, relevant, vibrant and self-sufficient internet ecosystem. Mucheru pointed out that while the cost of access to internet bandwidth is falling, it still remains high for many Africans.

Google's latest project, called the Endangered Languages, hopes to digitally archive some languages of the world that could soon become extinct.

Qu’on le koro, le breton et le potawatomi en commun? Ce sont toutes les trois des langues menacées de disparition. D’après National Geographic, une langue meurt toutes les deux semaines. Et d’ici à 2050, près de la moitié des 7.000 langues...

Today, Google has launched the Endangered Languages Project in an effort to support language preservations through technology and collaboration, and native speakers or scholars of Irish Gaelic are invited to contribute to the available information.

Google have announced that Gmail is now available in Welsh and Latin American Spanish, bringing the total number of supported languages to 56.

Good news for Welsh speakers using Gmail this month, "Cymraeg" is now an option under Settings > Language. Selecting this from the dropdown will change the Gmail default language to Welsh. The translation has been made possible in conjunction with the Welsh Language Commissioner and uses the Google Translator Toolkit, which is a Computer-Aided Translation tool supporting over 100,000 language combinations.

Wikipedia went dark to fight SOPA but its shining bright as a light for mobile users in Africa and the Middle East (AMEA). Wikipedia will be free to use -- without any data usage charges -- for users on Orange's mobile network.