This blog has been pretty quiet during the last couple of weeks, but not for lack of stuff happening with Maneno--quite the opposite. On the one hand, we've been busy working on a number of technical improvements and new features to the Maneno platform, especially for the hosted sites which we'll be putting a great of energy in to in the coming months. Then on the other hand, we've been plotting many activities for the second half of this month, such as blog trainings in Côte d'Ivoire and Mali.
Last but not least, we've been concocting some cool sessions at the 3-day BarCamp Abidjan that starts tomorrow. We've had several discussions with some of the organizers, namely Frederic Tapé, and lemme tell you: it's going to be great! They've worked really hard to make this event an even bigger success than the first edition of BarCamp Abidjan last July.
The organizing team, these incredibly energetic, creative-minded, geeky people, are all members of a group called Akendewa. Akendewa, which was born out of the first BarCamp Abidjan in July last year, is an Akan word that means web (or spider web, more precisely). Needless to say, its main objective is to promote the knowledge and use of the internet.
Maneno is honored to be one of the media sponsors of the event, so we'll be doing a great deal of live-blogging and live-tweeting about the different sessions and great people that will be there. So stay tuned here, Africamp and on Twitter with the hashtag #bcbabi (Babi is the nickname for Abidjan). We'll also be tweeting from the @africamps account, and probably also from our @Maneno account. There will most definitely be some crowdsourced CoveritLive happening as well, which will be announced on Africamp.
Since it's a BarCamp, we can't really give you many details about content of the program, but our participation is going to focus on blogging in Africa and localization efforts in African languages. Côte d'Ivoire is one of the countries in Africa with the biggest linguistic diversity and because of that, French is the most dominant language of all. We're excited to be bringing this discussion forward and curious to see what the feedback from the local developers will be.
More generally, we're also very excited about this BarCamp as it will allow us to meet a great deal of Ivorian developers and geeks. So far we've been really impressed with the tech scene in Côte d'Ivoire, and with all the techies we've already met, so this will be a great opportunity to learn, exchange ideas, and hopefully to collaborate.
And if all that wasn't enough, at noon on Saturday, we'll announce a competition we're very excited about. Then Saturday evening will be an even bigger future event announcement. Stay tuned, it's going to be big.
It's been in the works for the last two months as we coordinated the translation work from the very adept Mr. Oumar Bah, who now blogs (in French and Fula) at Konngol Afirik. And now, we're happy to announce that the Fula language version is live on Maneno! It's the 'FUL' option at the top for those who may know the language via a different spelling, such as 'Peul' in French.
Fula (or Fulfulde as it is known in the language) is spoken primarily in West Africa with around 16 million speakers or so according to Wikipedia. Although, it is the case that the amount of speakers could be as high as 50 million, as a commenter mentioned below. Given the number of dialects and the spread of the language, hard, fast numbers are hard to come by, but it is generally assumed that the Wikipedia article is far too conservative in its total.
The amount of countries that this language is spoken in to at least some extent is massive (take a look to the left), which is why we're very happy to have it as a language interface option. We hope that there will be a far reach with this language as Oumar is extremely well-versed in the Fula language mechanics. He compiled the first Fula-French online dictionary, which he is also looking to publish.
If you look at this language version of Maneno, you can see that there are similar issues as with the Bambara version in that there are a a number of characters which are outside the typical ones in the extended Latin alphabet. These should all have native supported on the internet, but that can support can sometimes be lacking. Thankfully, due to the Bambara experience, this was much less of a problem this time around, although Internet Explorer 6 simply will not display these characters, so upgrade if you can.
Again, we thank Oumar for all his work as well as Claire Ulrich who worked to connect us with Oumar in the first place.
We've had it up and running for some time now, but we're happy to officially state that the Bambara version of Maneno is now fully functional. This is all due to the ongoing work of Boukary Konate in Mali. He has toiled constantly on this version to make it work and we thank him a great deal for it.
It hasn't been easy to get this working. Earlier, we wrote about the problems in implementing this language interface. If it hadn't been for the SIL keyboard, it just wouldn't have been possible. And this is a shame really as there is no reason for this character set not to work.
One other nasty thing we discovered is that the Bambara characters simply will not work on version 6 of Internet Explorer. This is bad as around 20% of the Maneno traffic uses that browser and as Boukary found out, a great many of the computers in Bamako still use this browser that was originally released in 2001 and has been a kick in the face to web developers ever since. Explorer 7 and 8 are fine as are any versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. Leave it up to Microsoft to ruin the party...
If you happen to be visiting Bamako anytime soon, bring a new copy of Firefox to install anywhere you find a machine dragging along with IE6. It'll make life a lot easier from a linguistic point of view. Otherwise, take a look at the Bambara version of Maneno. Hopefully it will reach out to more native speakers of the language and open up access to get more of the language online as opposed to just French or English.
In constantly striving to create a more accessible platform, we at Maneno are always on the lookout for new languages to make the site available in because let's face it, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish versions are great, but we feel that the true strength of the site will be having the native languages of Africa available as well. Because of that, there is the Swahili version and soon (hopefully very soon) we will have a version in Bambara. In case you haven't heard of this language, let me assure you that this is not an April Fool's. This is a West African language that is spoken by around 2-3 million people. Naturally, it doesn't have a strong online presence, but we're hoping that this can change in the future because of efforts like this. I mean, if Slovenian, which is spoken by 2.4 million people can have a Wikipedia with over 100,000 entries, why not Bambara?
When it comes to integrating African languages in a website, one such as Swahili is overall, rather easy to implement. It uses a strictly English, Latin alphabet for the base of its characters. Bambara however gets considerably more complex. There are a number of characters which are in addition to the Latin base such as ɛ, ɔ, and ɲ (or ŋ depending on the dialect.) Typing these characters is a problem because there is no native support in Windows or the Mac OS.
By way of my pain, I would just like to point people to Sil, a group which has created a keyboard for Bambara and other languages, albeit a keyboard that is only for Windows machines. That takes care of the typing. There is still the issue of the displaying. For that, you need to encode your pages as UTF-8 which amazingly, actually supports these characters, although possibly not in every font for the web, so your kilometerage may vary. There is also the issue that any translation file needs to be created, from the start as a Unicode file. Regular files will just end up mashing up the extended characters.
That is a quick overview of the problems. I hope that it helps others who might be trying to do something similar with Bambara or other languages on the web. Obviously, once we launch this version of the site, you can be sure that we'll let everyone know about it as we think it will be pretty darned cool to have!
