Ushahidi: On Translation

The Ushahidi platforms' growing use has been astounding to say the least. The platform has been download almost 4000 times, not counting the mobile applications. The mobile applications (including the Android Oil Spill reporter by Henry Addo) have been downloaded more than 3700 times. As an organization that is barely two years old, it is encouraging to see adoption of the platform in various countries and for diverse uses. Be it election monitoring Burundi, Snowmaggedon in DC, or preventing forest forest fires in Italy; it is very encouraging to the development team to see people around the world using the platform to solve their local problems. That is the beauty of open source software. It allows for greater customization and localization. One of the early adopters of the Ushahidi technology was Oscar Salazar and the team behind Cuidesmos el Voto; they translated the platform into Spanish. This was huge for Ushahidi and for Latin America. Since then we have seen many deployments by organizations like Elecciones Transparentes in Colombia, Eleitor 2010 in Brazil and the Chile Map utilizing the Spanish language files that Oscar and his team helped translate (Eleitor 2010 translated the platform into Portuguese). On mobile phones, Pablo Destefanis and his team translated and customized the Ushahidi Windows Mobile app created by Dale Zak to map crime in El Salvador. This is amazing. An app developed by a Canadian software developer, being used in El-Salvador, with a platform originating in Kenya. All the while this has been happening, we had a partial translation of the platform in Swahili. We realized that the projects in Kenya really needed a Swahili version of the platform to encourage participation and outreach whenever an organization used the platform. We reached out to the developers in Kenya who could help, and Ahmed Maawy stepped up to the plate. The language files will be checked into Github and made available in the next version of Ushahidi. Thank you very much Ahmed for translating this, it will be a great help to organizations deploying the platform in East Africa. Ahmed is the gentleman in the middle. Picture was taken at a recent Developer Meetup in Nairobi's ihub. If you would like to download the Swahili language files directly, go ahead and click on this link i18n_swa.zip. We have the Polish, Russian and Chinese translations available too for those who are interested in using those languages in their deployments. Thank you to Kuba of Shipyard and Jakub Górnicki, Poland for the Polish translation, Altynbek Ismailov of SaveKG in Kyrgyzstan and Gregory Asmolov - Berkman Center Harvard in Massachusetts for the Russian version of the platform. If you would like to help translate the platform into your language, please email us at translation at Ushahidi dot com. Meanwhile, do watch out for the next version of Ushahidi, which will have some cool new features and the expanded plugin architecture.