PUK researcher gets internship in Ireland
An official media statement by Frikkie Kotzé

A new ‘window’ has opened for Roald Eiselen, junior researcher at CTexT (Centre for Text Technology – a research and development centre of the research focus area Languages and Literature in the South African Context), when he was recently selected for an internship at Microsoft’s “International Proofing Tools Team" in Ireland.  This group is responsible for the acquisition and development of spelling and grammar checkers, as well as other electronic writing tools for Middle Eastern, European and African languages.  Roald will be responsible for the evaluation of the spelling checkers and he hopes to develop a method to standardise the evaluation of spelling checkers of the various languages.  Under the supervision of Prof. Gerhard van Huyssteen (head of CTexT) and one of the staff members at Microsoft he will also continue to work on his master’s degree on the standardisation of spelling checker evaluation.

As honours student in Afrikaans and Dutch, Roald was involved in the development of the Afrikaans spelling checker and was later also part of the team that developed the isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho sa Leboa and Setswana spelling checkers for Microsoft.  CTexT’s relationship with Microsoft, as well as Roald’s role as computer linguist in this development project, literally opened the ‘window’ to Ireland.

To date CTexT has been involved in the following development projects:

• The Afrikaans Spelling Checker 2.1 and Hyphenator.
• Development of spelling checkers for isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana and Afrikaans.
• Management of localisation projects in collaboration with external translators for the translations of the user interface of Windows XP and Office 2003 in Afrikaans and Windows XP in Setswana and isiZulu.
• Multimedia language acquisition programmes for Setswana (“Tsenang!”) and isiZulu (“Ngenani!”).

The CTexT staff are currently working on extending the language acquisition programmes to other languages, and they are also in the process of developing an Afrikaans Thesaurus.