Press release, 29.5.2007

Date: 29.5.2007
Contact person: Project leader Sjur Nørstebø Moshagen, phone +358 50 56 34 319

the Sámi Parliament's Divvun project is today releasing the first publicly available version of Sámi proofing tools for the Microsoft Office suite. The suite contains among others the applications Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel.

The Sámi proofing tools contain spell checkers for North Sámi and Lule Sámi, and an automatic hyphenator for North Sámi. Hyphenation for Lule Sámi will come later this year. All tools are free, included the final version, and all source code for the tools made by the Sámi Parliament are freely available.

The tools launched today are not the final ones, but a so-called beta version, a version who should be void of any serious technical and other errors, but who still is not developed and tested. The goal by releasing this beta version is to get important feedback when it comes to missing words, eventual technical problems, and other possible weaknesses, so that they may be corrected before the final release at the end of the year.

The proofing tools being released are tools for MS Office for Windows and Mac. Tools for InDesign and OpenOffice.org will be released at a later date. OpenOffice.org is a free alternative to Microsoft Office, and is also available for Linux. Updates to the proofing tools will be published at regular intervals.

The tools are available at divvun.no, and can be downloaded by all interested parties. Copies of the tools may also be downloaded from the Sámi Parliaments homepage.

The Divvun project is run by the Norwegian Sámi Parliament, and is financed by the Sámi Parliament, the Ministry of labour and social inclusion, the Ministry of Culture and Church affairs, the Ministry of Education and Research, and Nordplus Sprog. The project cooperates closely with the Sámi language technology centre at the University of Tromsø. Integration with MS Office is delivered by Polderland Language & Speech Technology bv.