PAL

PanAfrican Localisation (abbreviated variously as PAL, PanAfrLoc, and PanAfriL10n) was a small project funded by IDRC and administered by Kabissa. Formally named "Enhancing Capacities for Localisation in Arabic and African Languages," it ran for three years (April 2005 through March 2008), and involved networking, workshops, and resource development - notably a localization wiki. Research on the latter resulted in a document that later was expanded to book format as African Languages in a Digital Age.

In the latter half of the project's 3-year run, a set of 3 email lists was set up for communication among project members. Each list was in a separate working language - English, French, and Portuguese - enabling one to post in one language and have the message machine translated into the other two. (Short description on the PAL wiki; archive of the messages on Yahoo! Groups.)

Upon the project's conclusion, IDRC's funding efforts in this area transitioned to the South Africa-based African Network for Localisation (ANLoc). The PAL wiki was retained on the ANLoc site, given a new look (see archived version via Archive.org), and edited further until Nov. 2013.

Since September 2015 the wiki is undergoing another transition on the Bisharat site, where it is hosted on a provisional basis.



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