Translate.org.za Development Blog

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.

Finally new Windows builds which should solve all previous problems:

• Fully multilingual and installs all languages by default
• Spell checkers included for Afrikaans and South African English
• Translate branding in place

We still need to validate all of this ourselves

Please download the Windows build and test. Installation should be simple. The package is a self-extracting zip archive and will unpack and begin the OpenOffice.org setup process. The setup process will be in English, or in another language if your locale is setup correctly.

Finally the test builds have arrived. This is mostly what will go into 2.0.0.1, we’ll post links to dev builds once we know where those are located. But for know check ou the builds on our download server.

Afrikaans: Windows installer, language pack

English: Windows installler, language pack

The language packs should work on your current Firefox 2.0.

Community builds for Firefox 1.5.0.8 is now up for download in all 11 official South African languages. Please see our Firefox Downloads page for more information.

Last month, October 2006, saw our OpenOffice.org builds downloaded by 254 people. This might not seem like an amazing number. But if you think that each of those people received an office suite at the level of Microsoft Office Professional then we’ve saved our users over R1 million. Lets not forget that not everyone downloads our builds of OpenOffice.org.

On top of this over 500 people are using our keyboard. Almost 400 are using an Afrikaans spell checker and a few 100 are using Firefox or Thunderbird in a language other than English.

This has irritated me for a while. The GDM login has some errors for South African languages:

1. The native name for Zulu, isiZulu, was spelt incorrectly (Dwayne’s bad)
2. Xhosa is not listed with its native name

We’ve created a patch which is attached to bug #363335 and addresses these issues. Should arrive for a GNOME sometime in the future.

[24 Oct 2006: Update: the patch was applied so will be in the next release of GNOME.]

The lastest build of OpenOffice.org for Windows are available here:
http://www.translate.org.za/download/dev/windows/OpenOffice203-20061012.exe

Not this is a self-extracting .exe so download and run to begin the installation.

This build fixes our multilingual install problem:

• All languages are selected by default
• Locale should be detected (not tested yet) ie if you have Afrikaans Windows it should install in Afrikaans (feedback on this would be appreciated)
• Branding is working in all places: installer, about, splash - yay!

Some minor issues remain:

• English (South Africa) is not named in the installer (its there but shows up as blank in the ‘custom’ install option)
• ‘Southern Sotho (Sutu)’ still exists - we really need to eliminate this cause of embarasement for Microsoft. Its also rather insulting to people who speak Sesotho - who ever heard of Sutu?

The other issues with regards to spell checkers still remain, we will begin addressing those now. At the risk of repeating myself these are:

• No dictionary install wizard (having this would at least allow users to easily download our checkers, or those we don’t package)
• Our checkers are not packaged eg Afrikaans - spell, hyphentation, etc.

We’re still trying to iron out the issues with our Windows OpenOffice.org builds. The builds look good and are fully localised but it the installation that is presenting problems and we have some things missing post installation:

• Dictionary installer wizard missing
• Branding missing
• Spell checkers not installed
• Installer seems to detect locale but only installs for that locale. We want all languages installed.

But please feel free to test - the more people who test, the more likely we are to find any lurking language related bugs.

To install do the following:

1. Remove any existing 2.0 installation
2. Download http://www.translate.org.za/download/dev/windows/ooo-win-build-ooo203-20060928-multilang.zip
3. Unzip the download
4. Run setup.exe
5. Follow the installers instructions

Please report errors to info@translate.org.za or the Afrikaans mailing list.

As promised TuxPaint now had Xhosa and Venda (and South African English of course) translations in RC2. This is not for the faint hearted as the only downloadable is a source tarball for your compiling pleasure. If you need help installing or compiling please ask your 3 year old. Don’t bother asking us, we haven’t tried.