There are around 7,000 languages in the world today, around half of which are written. Most language technology is only available for a tiny fraction of these. Certainly under 1%. Apertium is a project which aims to help create language technology, particularly machine translation systems for the other 99%. Because most of the languages we work with have very little in the way of existing translations, we rely on making the most of all kinds of different resources from written grammars to dictionaries, corpus collections and help from native speakers and activists.
- Twitter: * Be realistic: We're more likely to accept ideas which are realistic than ones which are "way out there". But if you have a "way out there" idea, don't panic! We're still interested, but we'll try to find a subset of it which is achievable in the time scale available.
- Be appropriate: Demonstrate you have a knowledge of Apertium, how it works and the problem it has that you'd like to solve.
- Have a plan: Three months may seem like a long time, but it isn't. Show you have a definite plan with dates and deliverables split into weeks.
- Get in contact ASAP!: We get a lot of proposals: some good, most bad. Get in contact with your potential mentor '''as soon as possible''' by sending your proposal to the mailing list, and asking for feedback. Be responsive to feedback. Refine your application based on feedback. If the mentors remember you, your chances of being picked are higher.
- Read the Ideas Page!: If you find yourself asking 'do you have any Java/Python/Fortran/x86 assembler projects...' -- you didn't read [[Ideas for Google Summer of Code|the ideas page]]. Read the ideas page.
- Do the coding challenge: Every idea will have a coding challenge to perform, this is basically a test to see if you have the required skills to do the project or if you can acquire them in a short amount of time.