Translate.org.za Development Blog

We have completed the migration of our translations from CVS to our new SVN repository. The translations were originally hosted in the translate project on SourceForge. But since that project has become more or a repository for the WordForge tools we decided that we needed to find a new home.

So we established the zaf project - zaf is South Africa’s 3 letter country code. This project will be used to host the Translate.org.za translations, spell checkers, locales and keyboard. The only things that will be hosted in this project are South African languages related. So in the migration we left behind all translations, spell checkers, etc for non-South African languages.

Currently mailing lists will remain as part of the translate project as for now its simply too much pain to move them. We are not using many SourceForge resources just SVN for now. We will probably host other resources at Translate.org.za which has proved to be a good way to do things.

Work has started to change the Translate.org.za website into a multilingual site. The site uses Joomla and we are using the Joomfish extension. Visitors should now see a dropdown allowing them to choose their preferred language, if their browser didn’t indicate their preference correctly. (See this article on how to set it.) Currently the pilot involves Afrikaans and we would appreciate feedback on this. We realise that not everything is translated yet, so no need to report that

Thanks to:

• Charl who got Joomfish up and running and who is fixing the website to make it all localisable. Funny how a project focused on localisation can get that wrong!
• Samuel for translating Joomla into Afrikaans. This gives us the Joomla specific entries in Afrikaans, as apposed to the content.
• Friedel who has translated most of the front page and the product blurbs into Afrikaans. I’m sure he’d appreciate your translation criticism.

One problem we’ve found with Joomfish is that although it tells you if an article is out of date it can’t tell you which part is out of date of the changes. This can be frustrating with very long articles. But generally it is usable.

I’ve been chatting to Axel Hecht who heads up Mozilla localisation. We have agreed that the level of translation of certain critical aspects of the user experience are not localised enough for them to be in 2.0. Mostly this relates to the configuration components. I know I’m disappointed but I think its critical for peoples perception of localisation in general.

For us the positive is that our languages are in the build system so as soon as we green light them they will be available. Another positive is that we have the workings of a multlingual build system for Mozilla which is what we want to use.

How did we end up in this situation. A number of issues:

• I didn’t want translators working on rapidly changing tex and Firefox has been changing quite a bit prior to release.
• Our migration off CVS to SVN didn’t help us making translations available for volunteers
• pootle.translate.org.za is still teething and we haven’t made its availability widely known.

We’re looking forward to 2.0.1 and hope that a number of translations can get in there.

If you are so sorely disappointed that you want to take your language to 100% I will do my best to help you get it done. So all is not lost.

Xhosa and Venda have been added to TuxPaint and should be in release 0.9.16rc2, we just missed rc1 but I assume it will be available from the same place when rc2 is finally released. A new volunteer began working on the Ndelebe translation of TuxPaint. We will make a front page announcement once there is something that people can download and enjoy.

We have just launched the Translate.org.za Wiki that we hope to use for gathering information relating to the various South African localisation projects currently taking place. This is an area for the coordination and documentation of any South Africa related FOSS localisation.  This will help staff and volunteers coordinate efforts and help to avoid duplicate work, etc.

The Translate.org.za Wiki is different than the Translate Wiki on SourceForge.  The SourceForge Wiki is now used to document the tools originally developed by Translate.org.za (Translate Toolkit and Pootle) which are now part of the Wordforge project and no longer for South African localisations.

We translated TuxPaint into Xhosa and Venda during this year’s Software Freedom Day. Work is continuing on Pootle to update the translations for the latest release of TuxPaint and to get some other translations done. A new version of TuxPaint is due out shortly and we hope to be included in that release.

Ever noticed how some websites just magically know what language you speak? Well, that is because your browser tells them your preferred languages. Have you never seen this? See this description on how to configure your browser. Show the world what language you speak! Google is one site that might respond in this way if your browser is set to Afrikaans, Sotho, Zulu or Xhosa. Pootle, our web based translation system, can now also do this, but we still need more translations in our South African languages. You can help by translating Pootle.

We’ve just built Translate.org.za versions of OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 for Linux. You can install from either .deb or .rpm depending on your distro. These are test builds as we are ironing our functionality for our Windows builds.

Included you will/should/might find:

• South African spell checkers
• User interface translations in all 11 languages
• Various branding patches
• VBA support
• And a few other nice things

Please test to see that we have all the functionality.

To install:

1. Download the RPMs or DEBs
2. Uninstall your existing OpenOffice.org, on an rpm system use ‘rpm -e `rpm -qa | grep openoffice.org`.  On Debian use dpkg.
3. Now install the new packages: rpm -Uvh or dpkg install
4. For RPM systems install the desktop integration appropriate for your distribution.  See the desktop-integration folder on the download site.
5. Install the languages that you need from the lang directory on the download site.
6. Begin testing.

The first multilingual Firefox for Windows is here for you to test, please do!

We realised that in South Africa separate builds for each language just don’t cut it. Most people would simply download the English version or if they did download a localised version that would give up and abandon the software unless it was easy to switch back. The same is probably true in many countries, even in Europe.
It took some convincing but Mozilla have for various reasons realised that this might be needed. The final build is actually not much larger then a monolingual build which is a very good thing.

There are a number of things that a multilingual build should do. This version does not do the following:

• No locale switcher. This is needed to make is easy to switch between languages. Future versions will include this. You can download the locale-switcher extension to get that functionality. This extension is not tested for version 2.0.
• No automatic detection of system locale. There are a number of issues with doing this. The result is that the installer and app will not automatically detect your current locale and set themselves to use that. It is not a train smash but a nice to have for now.