FreeMED shortly will be available in Japanese. A group of physicians in Kuyshu, Japan have set about translating FreeMED into Japanese. One of the difficulties they recognized early in the translation process was difficulty assigning words to some English phrases, keeping the intent or the meaning.

To promote translations, the FreeMED Software Foundation has opened a glossary WIKI as part of its i18n translations so that the nuances of the original phraseology can be maintained.

Our translation pages are located at http://i18n.freemedsoftware.org/ Once you have acquired a user name and password, ask for access to the translation WIKI so that we can maintain parallel glossaries across languages.

Our community has been especially active in acquiring new languages for FreeMED and the Foundation will announce them here so that those who would like to assist either with translations, translation edits or glossary updates can do so.

The impetus for language translation for FreeMED, which has always been language agile, is to allow for encoding of demographic information in the original langauge of the patient, allowing for medical information to be acquired in the physician’s language. In this way, especially countries with limited infrastructure, patients can be located in their own language.

FreeMED Software Foundation is committed to broadening and extending the usability of FreeMED and its allied programs. For a demonstration of FreeMED, download the LIVECD from http://sourceforge.net/projects/freemed/