The Autshumato project was initiated by the South African Department of Arts and Culture, and developments are done by the Centre for Text Technology (CTexT®) at the North-West University (Potchefstroom Campus), in collaboration with the University of Pretoria.

The general aim of this project is the development of open source machine-aided translation tools and resources for South African languages. The term “open source” implies that every application developed in this project is freely available to the general public. This definition also extends to the source code of every application.

The objective of establishing this project as an open source project adheres to the South African National Government’s policy and strategy for open source implementation.
This policy specifies that all new software developed for government should be based on open standards. Furthermore, government also encourages and supports the use of open content and open standards within South Africa.

The main aims for this project are:

• Development of a terminology management system;
• Development of an integrated translation environment (ITE) within an open source framework with the following components:

  • Word translators for ten South African language pairs (covering eleven languages);
  • Machine-translation systems for three South African language pairs (covering four languages);
  • A basic document management solution.
• Making these tools and services publicly and freely available on a designated website;
• Creating an open source community for the project, to ensure further development and expansion to other languages in the future.

The secondary aims of the project are:

• Fostering human resource development in all areas of the project; and
• Producing research outputs (scholarly papers and articles), technology outputs (selected core technologies), and resources (selected corpora) of international quality.

The translation tools developed in this project do not only aim at meeting the needs of the Department of Arts and Culture, but also that of a wide variety of South African citizens at various levels in a developing Information Society. This project therefore strongly contributes to the more rapid promotion of a culture of multilingualism in South Africa. It also contributes to language pride, and a consciousness of the importance to promote, preserve and develop minority languages in South Africa. By involving native speakers of the indigenous languages in this project, the shortage of people who are knowledgeable about and trained in ICT is also partially addressed, as it empowers native speakers of local languages to partake in the growing local and global HLT industry.