The Yoruba language is a language spoken by over 35 million people around the world. You will agree with me that this is enough to justify Yoruba language presence in Google Translate.

The process of adding a locale to Google Translate using Google Translator Toolkit is basically the same for all languages. There are however, 3 basic things to take note of;

• The language code, which you can find at http://sites.google.com/site/tomihasa/google-language-codes
• Mode of publishing e.g Wikipedia, knoll or glossary

Adding the Yoruba locale didn’t prove too hard a nut to crack as most of what needs to be done have been well documented and explained by Google via the Google online help service, which is made available at http://translate.google.com/support/toolkit/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1....

In this article I have used glossaries because I find it simpler and more generic. So whatever I will be explaining is considerably based on it. To summarize the documentation, there are basically four things to know;

• Choosing between Translation memories, glossaries and placeholders. Of course, glossary format is our choice here.
• Create a spreadsheet with an header row consisting of;
  • locale columns (i.e 2 columns. one column for the locale you are translating from(e.g en) and the second column for the locale you are translating to(e.g yo) )
  • part-of-speech column meant for the word you'll like to translate
  • description column: a brief description of the word
• Start to fill the spreadsheet with the required data
• When done, Save the spreadsheet as a .csv file format unto your computer Two very good tools I find useful for this are Google Docs Spreadsheet and OpenOffice Calc.
• Browse to http://translate.google.com/toolkit?hl=en and upload your saved glossary.

So, having explained how I started the process of adding the Yoruba locale to Google Translate using the powerful and simple Google Translate Toolkit, now is the time for you to get involved. click here to get involved.