Flag of Timor Leste

The Tetun Interface Project

Sections of this site are under continually under construction and evaluation

We Thank you for your patience

About Tetun

Tetun (a.k.a. Tetan, Tetum ) is the common "market place" language of the people of Timor Leste (East Timor). The official (e.g. ISO) name for this language is Tetum. Speakers of the language spell it as Tetun. Apparently there are no words that end in "um" in the language itself. Throughout this (English) site both spellings are used.

The Tetun Translation Project aspires to be a nexus for interface translation, documentation, utilities and other information to do with Tetun and Free /Open Source Software. That is: this site is about Computers / Software and related protocols.Some links to other resources are here: [ Tetum Links ]

There are four widely languages in Timor Leste. Tetum, Bahasa Indonesia, Portuguese and English (as a utility language). Beyond these there are some (anecdotal) 20 dialects or other separate languages.

Translations and Interface environments exist for Portuguese and English, and work has commenced on the Indonesian language Environment for Gnome2 at least. Tetun is currently the least developed environment, (but then we have only just begun and have a much smaller user base). I hope that we can progress reasonably quickly and not exclude the language of the people from the desktops of Timor Leste. One of the long term aims of this site is to provide cross language dictionaries for all of these languages..

Here are links to the
Mohammad DAMT led Gnome Indonesian Translation Project ,
http://gnome.linux.or.id
and the European Portuguese Gnome2.4 translation project.
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/gnome-2.4/pt/index.html

Goals include :

Currently the "default" operating system is Debian GNU/ Linux though any Free Software based system would be supported.

The criteria is simple; It's open source / free software (GPL or equivalent) and it's Tetun. Any thing that meets that selection criteria will be considered for inclusion.

Tetun speakers can contribute readily (and effectively) by adding to and refining the list of interface messages or simply telling us (tetum-translators AT nongnu DOT org) how to do all of this better. You don't need to be a UNIX hacker or even be able to speak Tetun. If you would like to manage the web site .. just ask ! If you have an idea for a sub-project tell us.

If you join the project We will set you up an account with the project which will give you write access to our CVS repositories and / or access to the Savannah Project Management Site. Who knows you may even want to contribute to other Savannah projects.

Need Help ? [ Mail Us : ] [ Last modified: Sun May 30 01:45:29 CST 2004 ]