Translate.org.za Development Blog

We’ve just uploaded South African builds of Firefox. We now have version 1.5.0.11, this solves the encoding bug picked up earlier this month. You can download XPIs or Windows .exe.

I’m usually suspect of machine translation. Its gets most things wrong in my opinion, but then again it is useful for getting the gist of a paragraph.

Andreas has been working with people from Apertium, doing MT form English to Afrikaans and back. Hard but then also not hard in that Afrikaans and English are related. You can give the it a whirl in their test environment. How about trying “Ek is ‘n boer”, you’ll notice its actually very good at Inglish

We’re excited about this as the potential for close languages like the Nguni and Sotho groups of languages is very good.

As you might or might not know the international dialing prefix for outgoing international calls changed from 09 to 00 recently. You didn’t know? Try dialing 09 now and see how far you get.

To make sure our glibc locale data is up to date we released a new version of the locales. Actually its just English that needs to change as all the other 10 inherit the telephone section from it.

What does this mean? Not much, except that applications that get the international select code from the locale will now get South Africa’s correct. For us its also a simple indicator that free software really is empowering. We’ve changed this we haven’t had to wait for work arounds while someone feeds this up to the powers that be.

You can download the new locale data package (you need to know what you’re doing) or track the glibc bug.

A rather strange and spurious bug in the Afrikaans Firefox has a fix, we’re just waiting for approval.

For those who must know the bug worked a bit like this… If the page you where wanting to view didn’t have an encoding set then Firefox tries the default encoding as set for your language. In Afrikaans we use ISO-8859-1. The only problem is it was specified as ‘ISO 8859-1′ - not the missing dash before 8859.

Thanks go to Schalk Heunis who gave us a report that allowed us to start the search.

The fix should go into Firefox 2.0.0.4 for Afrikaans. We hope to point you to some nightly builds to check the fix for us.

You can also fix it in your current version by doing the following:

• Browse to: about:config
• Search for: intl.charset.default
• Change it t: ISO-8859-1 (note the dash, the current entry has a space)