This Day of Reconciliation we’re pleased to announce that key parts of SAFIRE federation hub (including the transfer notices) are now available in Sesotho. This brings the number of South African official languages supported by the federation to five.

The federation’s main user interface is now available in IsiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, English and Sesotho. According to Stats SA this covers the home languages of over 70% of South Africans, as well as providing coverage for the four dominant language groupings in South Africa.

TENET commissioned a professional translation of key parts of the SimpleSAMLphp user interface, which we’ve contributed back to the project. The decision to use Sesotho was based on their advise around mutual intelligibility with other Tswana-Sotho languages. This is the last translation we plan to contribute to SimpleSAMLphp, although we hope to be able to provide ongoing updates for the ones we’ve already contributed as SimpleSAMLphp’s user interface evolves.

We continue to encourage participants in the federation to include all known translations — particularly of their official names — in their metadata. This is particularly relevant to South African universities, which typically translate their names into three or more languages. Where such translations exist, they will be correctly used within SAFIRE’s user interface when an appropriate language is selected.

Users who notice any errors in translation (into any language) are welcome to contact us, and we’ll attempt to correct them.