NWU supports multilingualism with free spellchecker
Free gifts are few and far between, and they’re even more appreciated when they’re useful. The NWU’s Centre for Text Technology (CTexT®) recently announced that their African languages spellchecker package will in future be provided free of charge to staff and students for use across the NWU. Let’s communicate!
Staff and students of the NWU have long been familiar with CTexT®’s excellent Afrikaans spellchecker, Afrikaanse SkryfGoed. Now they can also use the African languages spellchecker package to make sure that their grammar and spelling do justice to their hard work. This package includes spellcheckers and hyphenation facilities for nine African languages.
“This is wonderful news, particularly in view of the task that the Department of Higher Education and Training has set for universities, namely to promote African languages as academic languages,” says Johan Blaauw, director of the NWU’s Language Directorate.
“With the NWU’s multilingualism language policy, we envisage that Setswana will play a much more prominent role on the campuses in Mahikeng and Potchefstroom, as will Sesotho on the campus in Vanderbijlpark,” he says. “The spellcheckers will become essential to many more people.”
He says a major benefit of the free spellchecker is that it will also help to standardise spelling across campuses, thus promoting the correct use of language.
Johan Zerwick, language practitioner for Setswana at the Language Directorate, set the ball rolling when he initially enquired about why only the Afrikaans spellchecker was available for free to staff and students.
“I was given a new computer at work and wanted to load the Setswana spellchecker I had purchased some time before on that computer too. The commercial licence was valid for only one computer. This meant that I would have had to purchase it again, and I felt that this was unfair, as I used the spellchecker exclusively for work, and African language-speaking staff and students therefore did not have the same advantage as the Afrikaans users.”
He sent his enquiry to the staff at CTexT®, which had developed the African language spellchecker in collaboration with Microsoft. They immediately started investigating the possibility of providing NWU staff and students with this package free of charge too.
Dr Martin Puttkamer, head of CTexT®, says that staff and students can now download, install and use the package across the NWU.
He says the long-term objective is to make the African language spellcheckers available free of charge to schools as well. However, this will only be possible after obtaining the necessary funding for the input costs and the support that will be required.
The package is available from the IT helpline and will in future be part of the standard NWU setup that is loaded onto all computers.
Free spellchecker
How the idea started
CTexT® is a research and development centre on the NWU’s campus in Potchefstroom. The centre conducts research on language technology and develops language technology products for the South African languages. CTexT® focuses on the development of applications and resources for easier interaction between people and computers, as well as innovative approaches to the processing of natural language.
More about CTexT®
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