Microsoft invents IT language for Mapuche Indians in Chile

The story about Microsoft’s translation of its software into Mapuzugun, a language spoken by about 400,000 indiginous Mapuche Indians in Chile, has been raising a lot of attention on the net. The Mapuche Indians want to take Microsoft to court for using their language without having consulted them to get their permission. The big question being raised concerns ownership of a language, i.e. can Mapuzugun be considered the intellectual property of the Mapuche Indians, and this is what the Mapuche Indians would like the courts to decide.
I suspect that the Microsoft translation project is related to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s plan to increase accessibility to ICTs in several developing countries, Chile being among them, by supplying public libraries with free computers and Internet connections. Of course, for such a project to be successful, they can hardly set up a bunch of computers with interfaces in English or other common languages, that are not commonly spoken by the anticipated beneficiaries of the project. But, and here is the other issue in this and the more serious one in my opinion, that computer software would be translated and localised without consulting the people concerned borders on the outrageous. It’s like if Microsoft would suddenly tell francophones that the French word for a computer will henceforth be “le computer”. Imagine the ruckus that that would cause!
The problem here is that the IT lingo, which I assume was lacking in the Mapuzugun language, is not being allowed to emerge from the cultural consciousness of the Mapuche, but is rather being imposed on them. This becomes a question of equity, meaning that if the language comes from the outside it is reflecting the knowledge and understanding of a foreign culture, and thereby, limiting the sense of ownership in the concept(s) being promoted, in this case of the Mapuche Indians and ICTs. Hence, ICTs are presented as a concept of outside origin to which the Mapuche Indians have to adapt rather than as a tool which the Mapuche Indians can adapt to their own needs. This simply goes against everything that ICTs are intended to promote in the context of development for a globalised knowledge-based economy.