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Welcome to Bickers Sāmoa, we are still working on this website, so please be patient. Cyclone Evan disrupted some of our projected timeframes, but everything is back on track, we're concentrating on particular on the MS Office software upgrade which is almost completed and is a major upgrade with about nine thousand additions to the lexicon and diacritic instertion. Our other major work is the new translation software which is finally up and running and has passed the testing stage and has been in use with a couple of professional translators since October 2012. So this is ready for release.

A lot of the resources we have are absolutely free. Those built on open source software in particular. We do not have any interest in Politics, we're not affiliated with any particular religion or academic institution, and we're not interested in becoming involved with anyone elses agenda. Our only interests at this point are digitising the Samoan Language and creating computer based resources for it.

Our software is in use in 11 Government Ministries in Sāmoa, including the Ministry of Information Technology and Communication. We also donated our software to their Community Programme and it is now being utilized in villages around Sāmoa. As part of our 50th Anniversary celebration, we donated our software to the General Public of Sāmoa for 2 months, so it's enjoying quite a wide distribution amongst private citizens as well.

Ua 'ou tu'u'esea 'upu palauvale, 'āfai 'e te fia iloa sipela, fa'alafi muamua le sapelu ona fesili ai lea i ou mātua.

ONLINE RESOURCES

Facebook in Samoan (developed in association with Professor Kevin Scannell )

Google Chrome is available direct from their repository https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/moolaomdjoelmpjlijekjammeijelmae

This is not a full translation at this point. Still a work in progress but it works fine and is fun and educational to use.

Spellcheck for Mozilla (type in Samoan in any webpage, form or chat, and check spelling as you type.

This allows you to use our software to enter fa'amamafa and koma liliu as well as check spelling)

OFFLINE RESOURCES

Samoan Language Toolkit for MS Office

This software package makes typing in Samoan a lot easier by giving you all the basic correction features that are already available for English and some others especially made for the Samoan Language. An extremely useful resource package which seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Office. Most of us use the English version every day, our Samoan version works in much the same way but has added features specific to Samoan.

Fa'amamafa (macrons) are normally time consuming to insert, with this software most fa'amamafa are automatically produced for you as you type. We have also made it much easier to type the fa'amamafa by making it an intuitve process rather than the symbol insertion that is used by Microsoft. The normal things like Capitalizing country names Niu Sila, Ausetālia, Egelani, Falani. Village names Safotu, Apia, Salelologa. Personal names Mālia, Ioane. Days of the week, months. Biblical names Iesū, Apera'amo, Esekielu, Keriso . everything the English version does.

This is what it normally looks like when you type even a simple letter in Samoan, red lines all over the place, so you have no idea if you're spelling correctly or not

This is what it looks like after using the toolkit

Basically we have made it much more efficient to communicate in Samoan, there's nothing new about the concept most languages did this ten years ago. The backbone developed by Chris for this software is actually better than the dictionaries in use in our schools. As part of our extensive testing processes we scanned an enormous quantity of Samoan text over a period of several years, including all the existing educational materials we could acquire, forms, newspapers, books, bibles and many more. Without exception we found numerous errors. Often over 100 errors per page.

Our software is constantly being improved and upgraded as we collate and test continuously using automated processes (computer programs), with all final work being done manually.

Currently we have a toolkit for Microsoft Office 2007 and later for All versions of Windows, Mac OS x
Several Adobe products such as Adobe Professional, Dreamweaver, Photoshop and some others.

Click here for more examples and details

Spellcheck , diacritics etc for Adobe products (much the same as the MS Office version)

Spellcheck and diacritics for Open Office  (much the same as the MS Office version)

ONLINE PROJECTS IN DEVELOPMENT

Contemporary Online Dictionary

 Spellcheck for Internet Explorer (type in Samoan and spellcheck while you type, this also allows you to enter fa'amamafa easily)

Mozilla Firefox full localization (the entire interface in Samoan, this with the addition of our spellchecker for Mozilla will make the internet into a full Samoan experience) This is now in testing mode and we have working versions available. We expect it to be fully completed and available online for free in the near future. We will build a seperate webpage for this project as it has been a big success and basically makes Samoan the leader of the whole of Polynesia in this field.

Full translation package for Google Chrome (translate whole web pages to Samoan) This project is on hold while we concentrate on more imortant projects.

OFFLINE PROJECTS IN DEVELOPMENT

Offline Samoan/English

MS Office grammar correction/thesaurus/dictionary/translation package

This is being developed as professional level software and has many features specific to Samoan that have never been implemented before. This is a very complex project several years in the making, orignally intended just as a simple dictionary/translation package, it has since expanded into much more exciting, useful and comprehensive toolkit.

Open Office grammar correction/thesaurus/dictionary package

This is similar to the MS Office project above

TRANSLATION SOFTWARE

We now have translation software up and running for offline, online, and network use.These allow multiple people to work on the same project simultaneously and provide homogeneity of terminology and central administration of projects. These are a first for Samoan and have been developed to professional levels.

Anyone interested in the Samoan Language ToolKit can contact us at edresources@bickersc.com

Enquiries into the translator/grammar corrector/dictionary/thesaurus combo can also be sent to edresources@bickersc.com
Likewise any of our bilingual training and educational products. (a seperate webpage for these is under construction, please be patient.)

If you think of a program that it would be useful to have tools for, let us know and we will look into developing it
For Networking and Engineering enquiries please contact chris@bickersc.com (existing clients only)
For general enquiries please contact support@bickersc.com, (existing clients only, non clients are filtered out and will not receive replies)
For unconstructive criticism and blatant abuse, please contact auto-delete@bickersc.com

All language software with the exception of the Facebook interface was funded by and developed solely by Chris Bickers who retains all rights.