The University of the North West has given a boost to multilingualism in SA, a country with 11 official languages.
The university's language solution enables Microsoft users to check spelling in documents written in Setswana, Sesotho sa Leboa (Northern Sotho), isiXhosa and isiZulu. Each of these languages has its own software package, which is sold individually.
The university's Centre for Text Technology (CTexT) initiated the project after the success of its Afrikaans spelling checker, launched last year.
These products have particular appeal for businesses as more and more companies prefer to communicate with clients using their home language. Absa Bank is one such company.
Seed funding was provided by the National Research Fund, Bytes Document Solutions, Altron Charitable Trust and the university.
Further funding came from Microsoft itself.
"Our experience in developing the Afrikaans spelling checker gave us the necessary technological background for efficient sharing of knowledge with the other languages," says CTexT head Gerhard van Huyssteen.
"By international standards, our product outperforms other spelling checkers," he says.
After being installed as a plug-in, the software integrates itself into Microsoft Office products.
The isiZulu and isiXhosa offerings have an intelligent spelling function in addition to the standard functions. These "morphological analysers" split words to determine whether new words are spelt correctly. This is necessary to handle the complexities of these languages. The product also hyphenates long words in the right place at the end of a line.
CTexT, which holds intellectual property rights for the product, spearheaded the project, which involved 30 academics and developers. Other team members came from the University of Pretoria and Unisa.
CTexT has partnered two IT companies, Blue-Tek and Bowline, to handle marketing, sales and distribution.
They have sold about 30 packages in each of the four programs offered since their launch in July.
For its contribution to multilingualism, CTexT was awarded the Johan Kruger Prize from the SA Institute of Translators.
