Language Technology and Resource Development in East Africa

The paper discusses the status of language technology (LT) in Eastern Africa. The resource development, including human resources, various kinds of language materials, such as text corpora, manuscripts, dictionaries, thesauri and grammars are discussed and evaluated. Also language manipulation tools already available and those under construction are described. Discussion is carried out on the need and problems of standardization. Also localization programs, such as Kilinux for adapting OpenOffice to Swahili, and the translation of MS Office 2003 and Windows XP to Swahili, are introduced. The shortage of high quality open source platforms as well as the need of African governments to support the development of such platforms are also discussed.