Among all of the great new features that will ship in the upcoming LibreOffice 5.0, there is one that I’m especially excited about: this will be the first release that will include a brand new translation into Guarani, the millenary language of approximately eight million people in South America, mainly in Paraguay.
As you may know, I’m a translator and an activist who supports language preservation. This is also one of the principles supported by the Document Foundation, which aims to provide the world with free tools for document creation and preservation to all the world’s peoples, regardless of their economic status or social situation, helping to make the world a bit more egalitarian towards those sectors of the population that are still being discriminated due to their knowledge of a different tongue, and fighting towards lessening the digital divide.
What makes this so groundbreaking is that there are no other professional software tools available in Guarani yet, and hopefully we will help convince other software makers to push towards supporting this and other “indigenous” languages—which are our own, in contrast with the languages that the destructive European colonialism left us with.
I would like to thank Giovanni Caligaris, the volunteer translator who is driving this effort forward.
