By Martin Benjamin | Executive Director
The visible highlight of this past quarter was the release of our mobile app for Android. The initial launch has "only" eleven languages, and a limited feature set, but it is a prime demonstration of what is going on behind the scenes. When it comes to vocabulary selection between any two non-English languages in the 1.0 release, the app demonstrably beats the socks off Google Translate.
You can try this at home: install our app, install the Google Translate app, and run them head to head for a pair where you can probably make some sense of the results. Romanian to Catalan for the word "casa" or "iute" are good examples, even if you speak neither language. You can download the app at the Google Play store, linked from http://kamusigold.org/info/here_android
iOS users, patience please, we are slated to have a version for you by late March.
This is a demonstration of the technology, but the heart of our work is the data - particularly the data for African and other excluded languages. We are waiting for a partner in South Africa to put the finishing touches on 5 languages that we will be able to bring right into the current system, possibly this quarter, along with 18 languages from India that are ready save one technical index file. The first portion of our Kinyarwanda data is also ready to import; Kinyarwanda is mutually intelligible with Kirundi, where we've been stuck because we haven't raised enough funds yet to reactivate the student stipends, so meanwhile we've taken an alternative path toward getting a working resource onto devices that can be used in both Burundi and Rwanda.
We also prepared a large and complicated data set for the Fula language, spoken by 25 million people from Mauritania to Cameroon. This data now needs to be aligned with our main concept set using our "DUCKS" system, along with about 65 other languages beyond the first 60 for which we have a pre-existing index. The 126 languages in various stages on the path to inclusion are shown at http://kamusigold.org/info/gold_languages_info, including a fair number of African and other non-lucrative languages.
I can already predict next quarter's update: more data for more languages, on a better technological backbone. Thanks for your continued support in pushing us on that path.
Happy 2017,
Martin
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