Sourcefabric brings free media tools to Armenia
The free and open source software tools for media developed by Sourcefabric have interfaces localized in several of the languages of Eastern Europe, including Russian, Ukranian, Belarusian and Georgian. Now, we'd like to add support for Eastern Armenian, the variant based on the Yerevan dialect which is the official language of the Republic of Armenia. This language differs slightly from Western Armenian, as spoken in the significant Armenian diaspora. Like their neighbours in Georgia, the people of Armenia have a unique alphabet which we are able to add support for our software using the international UTF-8 encoding system.
Having the interface of media tools translated into the journalist's own language broadens the reach of the software to those contributors who do not speak English, but it also provides a benefit to those that do understand English. When concentrating on writing the next breaking news story, journalists using localized software do not have to switch their attention to software menus, buttons and dialogue boxes in a foreign language.
The first software we would like to localize in Eastern Armenian is Newscoop, the content management system used by independent media organisations all over Europe and Latin America. The Newscoop core program has around 2400 different interface strings, but using the online translation platform Transifex, the work of translating and reviewing these strings can be shared by a distributed team. Anyone with a free Transifex account can log in and work on as many strings as they wish to. If you don't understand the context of a string, leave a comment underneath it, and a member of the Newscoop team will help you. You can also refer to the Newscoop manual for journalists and editors if you aren't sure about a feature, or try it for yourself on the Newscoop demo site.
If you can read and write Armenian script and would like to help independent media grow in Armenia, we would love to hear from you. Support and training for volunteers will be provided by Sourcefabric. Mikayel Karapetyan, Sourcefabric's Quality Assurance lead engineer and a native Armenian, said: "With a localized version of Newscoop you will have a powerful tool behind your own website."