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From: | Mark Horner |
Subject: | Re: [Fhsst-bio] Some random thoughts |
Date: | Tue, 12 Apr 2005 20:34:10 -0700 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) |
Hi Nicole I agree that the language issues definitely need to be resolved.We sent a representative, Rory Adams, to a conference, Learning Materials in Southern Africa, earlier this year. One of the supporting documents for the conference was a report attributing a large portion of the difficulty students in Africa have with science to the fact that they are not taught in their home language.
If you go to http://www.nongnu.org/fhsst/1_news.html there is a link in the news item to the conference page if you are interested.
There is a relatively large online community of people working on Afrikaans wikipedia articles and it was always my intention to start with them when a book was finalised and we wanted to produce an Afrikaans version.
Xhosa and Zulu will be a bit tougher but its definitely something we'll have to look into. I remember an article from a while back about a translation project into Tswana but I couldn't find it on google.
BTW - Joanne doesn't have very regular email access so it might be a few more days before we hear from her.
Perhaps you and Ronell could start on a rough set of guidelines for future contributors?
Cheers, Mark Graeme & Nicole wrote:
Hi there all Thanks for breaking the ice, Mark! I'm looking forward to getting stuck into this project. I just though I should mention that I have access to a wonderful set of diagrams from the scheme of work at my school, all of which are already electronic, for all the sciences. They may be under copyright, but I'll check that and let you know. If not, then let me know what diagrams you'd like, and I'll have a search for you - I'm thinking particularly of the other sciences now (not maths, sadly). The other thought I had is that since we're trying to make this accessible to 2nd language Eng speakers, it would be great to find someone who is fluent in scientific Xhosa and/or Zulu and/or Afrikaans. I'm thinking that it would be helpful to have a glossary at the back of the textbook which translates key words into those langauges, and gives a brief definition, again, in those languages. I think those 3 are probably the most predominantly spoken languages in the country out of the other 10, so by covering them we'd make the textbook much more accessible. I know we don't need to be thinking about that right now, but until we get translations done, I think it would be a good alternative approach. Anyway, Joanne and Ronell - looking forward to working with you and getting to know you over the coming months (years??). Bye for now. Nicole ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ fhsst-bio mailing list address@hidden http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fhsst-bio
-- --Mark Horner Jabber/AIM/Yahoo: marknewlyn
Co-author: http://www.nongnu.org/fhsst http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/fhsst "Life is but a seg-fault away ... Life received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. 0x42074d40 in calloc () from /lib/i686/liblife.so.6"
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