Translate.org.za Development Blog

We’ve started migrating our translations for Mozilla Firefox 3. The first language migrated is Afrikaans which is still only at 68% translated, we hope to get to 100% relatively quickly. Our aim is to ensure that Afrikaans is part of the official release. Our other languages we will take one by one through the official process.

We would appreciate testing of these Afrikaans builds even with such low translation status as it will help identify problems early. All the development builds will be available from:

http://download.translate.org.za/dev/firefox/

You can identify your language from the language code. There are also language packs so you can install a certain language and add other language packs.

There are Mac, Windows and Linux builds.

Time to give the Afrikaans Thunderbird translation a spin as it is now an official Mozilla Thunderbird release. Thanks to all the hard work put in by Friedel and Samuel we made it into this release. There was much fixing of bugs to get the access keys correct and to fix some untranslated text.

Since Mozilla added the ability to expose language packs on their download page, we’ve decided to get all of our languages there.

For now these are all in the sandbox, which means they are in testing and need review.  Please review them, but be aware of the following known issues:

1. Not everything is translated: these are simply migrations of Firefox 1.5 translations to 2.0 so unfortunately these things  are not all translated.
2. Setting dialogue is mostly untranslated: Firefox 2.0 saw a major revamp of that interface, see point 1.
3. All HTML errors are in English: same as above

We would appreciate your help in fixing any of these errors or course.  If you are a professional translator, language student, passionate about your language then you can use our web translation tool to help us add the missing entries or correct any mistakes.

For your download pleasure here are all the language packs:

• Afrikaans
• English (South African)
• Ndebele
• Northern Sotho
• Southern Sotho
• Swati
• Tsonga
• Tswana
• Venda
• Xhosa
• Zulu

The South African English spell checker for Firefox and Thunderbird is now officialy reviewed and available for download.

Many thanks to all those who tested it.  Friedel picked up a showstopper right at the beginning, phew.  We’re getting a few thousand downloads a week so somebody likes what we’ve done.

The South African English spell checker has just entered testing for Firefox and Thunderbird. We need your help to get it live.

To help please:

1. Download and install the spell checker. In Firefox this will automagically install the checker.
2. Thunderbird: you will first need to save the file to your computer and then from within Thunderbird add the checker: Tools -> Addons -> Install…
3. Now use the checker
4. Please provide a review - we need these to go live and of course if you see any bugs please report them to us. You can add them as comments to this posting.

Previously we mentioned that we had fixed the Linux locales so that they now correctly specify the outgoing international dialing prefix as 00, in the past it was 09. These have been committed to glibc and make their way to your Linux desktop soon.

A new version of the Afrikaans spell checker for Firefox and Thunderbird has been released.  If you already have it intalled then it should be automatically updated, otherwise you can download the checker.

At the Pan African Localisation workshop and Blitz held in Morocco in February 2007, various Africans gathered to discuss localisation. As a practical component of this gathering Translate.org.za lead an exercise to create locales for the various languages spoken by participants at the event.

Once again Free and Open Source software demonstrated its power by allowing people to change software to meet their needs, instead of hoping that one day a proprietary vendor might care enough to meet their needs.

Not all participants managed to complete their locales, but 4 of them did and today marks the day on which their locales have been integrated and verified for inclusion in the next version of OpenOffice.org.

OpenOffice.org 2.3 is scheduled to be released in early September and will include locales for:

• Sango - Marcel Diki-Kidiri
• Lingala - Denis Moyogo Jacquerye
• Luganda - Martin Benjamin (and others)
• English (Ghana) - Paa Kwesi Imbeah

For speakers of these languages, an estimated 5,5+ million people, this work has impact in that they can for the first time correctly choose dates and times for their language and country and adjust the behaviour of OpenOffice.org to cater for other cultural conventions.

But more critically in the long term it means that they can now create documents correctly tagged as having being written in that language. For most Africans who do not have locale support for their language they will traditionally write the document in their language while the computer assumes it is written in American English. While this works it is causing inestimable long term damage; search engines cannot find Lingala documents, we cannot draw text from Sango documents to help build spell checkers or do language research. But now for these languages and for users using OpenOffice.org they can create documents correctly labeled and in the future help researchers and users of their content access it correctly.

The event was hosted by the IDRC as part of their broad effort to assist localisation in Africa and was coordinated and run by Tactical Tech.

There are now Afrikaans spell checkers available for Firefox and Thunderbird 2.0.0.*

Andreas upgraded the Afrikaans spell checker builder to create a valid 2.0 XPI so that the spell checkers will now work on 2.0.0.* versions of Thunderbird and Firefox. These have been placed on the Mozilla addons site, they’re in the sandbox for now, we hope that they will soon be available from the main site.

You can download or add a review (you must be logged into the sandbox).

You might also want to stay up-to-date with this Firefox bug which is replacing MySpell with Hunspell on Firefox and Thunderbird.  The main benefit with Hunspell is that it handles aglutenation which will mean better Afrikaans suggestions and checking in the future.

Now we have OpenOffice.org 2.2.1 in Afrikaans, there has been a lot of work to get our OpenOffice.org work updated and released along with the latest versions of the software.

With the release of 2.2.1 we’ve seen our translations migrated and updated, we’re not 100% translated, but you’ll probably never meet those untranslated messages.  We currently sit at about 96%.

Release 2.2.1 addresses a number of security issues so we recommend that you give it a try.