You may be a linguist who is fascinated by the structure of indigenous languages, or you may be more interested in translating texts into these languages to promote literacy. You may be interested in creating a simple bi-lingual wordlist, or you may be working as a team to create a comprehensive dictionary. You may be translating small pamphlets about water purification, or you may be translating Scripture texts. Whatever the case, the tools of your trade are not the most popular, nor are they easy to find, even on the Internet. Why?
Frankly, there is not a lot of money to be made in this market (we're talking local languages with smaller populations) and there is not a lot of advertising taking place. Often someone works on a tool for a specific task like charting sentence structure, uses it to complete work on a degree program and then abandons it. Sometimes that's the end, but other times people pick up on the development and take it further. In the end a pretty good product emerges, but is passed word-of-mouth in certain education circles. The purpose of this site is to bring all of these linguistic and translation tools for minority languages out of the woodwork and up for public review. Each tool may be rated by users as to its effectiveness in the various tasks that are a part of this domain we're calling LingTranSoft.
We welcome your software submissions, just register to submit software for review. If you are a user, please take the time to rate the existing software, and to add your comments to help prospective users gain a balanced view of their strengths and weaknesses.
Contact us here with language technology questions or ways to improve this site.