Translate.org.za Development Blog

Whose blogging in your language? No one it seems. We’ve just set up planets for all the official languages of South Africa. So that we can pull all the mother-tongue blogs together.

What is a planet? Well it is simply a page that pulls stories via RSS from various blogs. But its easier to understand if you look at the Afrikaans planet (one of our staff decided that the correct translation for bloggers in Afrikaans should be boernaliste - we’ll wait for someone to take offence)

The results? Rather disappointing. There seem to be lots of blogs in Afrikaans, we haven’t added 1% of what we’ve seen. In the other languages? Nada. We found one Sotho blog… all in English. One Xhosa blog that seemed to have died some time in the past. Come on guys start blogging.

Found a blog that we need to add? Please email it to info@translate.org.za.

There are a number of ways to guess languages. Why would you want to do that? Well if you have a piece of test you might want to know what language it is written in. The Sonnet project (building a spell checking framework for KDE) is using it to guess the language of your text so that it can adjust its operation to spell check in the appropriate language.

We’ve just submitted the data needed to guess the remaining South African languages. So that when Sonnet becomes part of KDE4 it will guess South African languages correctly.

New versions of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird was posted to the site. Both are now at 1.5.0.9. Afrikaans and South African English versions of Firefox 2.0 are available for testing. Those interested in the status of the official inclusion of these two locales in Firefox, would be happy to know that we foresee both to make it into Firefox 2.0.0.2. You can follow the bugs in the Mozilla bugs database if you like, for example this one.