Cànan software developers Chris Mitchell and Evan Brown have returned from Heerlen, Holland after delivering a paper to the Open Source for Education in Europe conference.

Chris and Evan teamed up with Learning and Teaching Scotland’s (LTS) Jim Henderson to speak on “Adapting Open Source Software for Education: Challenges, Methodologies and Results”, drawing on their experiences of localising OpenOffice.org into Scottish Gaelic.

Cànan won an open, nationwide tendering process in November 2003, and was subsequently awarded the contract by (LTS) to produce a Scottish Gaelic version of OpenOffice.org

The OpenOffice.org localisation was the first creation of an office suite in Scottish Gaelic, and with a total translation of over 120,000 words, gave Gaelic speakers an industrial strength application for the first time.

Evan Brown said: “The conference proved to be very interesting.  We met people who are involved in open source development from different perspectives and for different reasons. The strand in which we delivered our paper was particularly relevant as it included contributions from others who are conducting research in similar areas of computational linguistics and corpus creation.”