Translate.org.za Development Blog

download.translate.org.za is up!

Many thanks to Brad and Lorenzo from Rhodes University who have helped make this possible. This will take the download load off of translate.org.za which is kindely hosted by Obsidian Systems (those same people who give everyone free Jabber at jabber.obsidian.co.za).

We will begin the slow process of uploading our files to the new download site. I’m discovering how brain dead sftp really is :(. After that we will start rewriting links to point to the correct spot in the ether.

Oh by the way for those who are interested and this is by no means a quotable statistic. We are looking at about 100 downloads of OpenOffice.org a month. Similar numbers for Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird together in Afrikaans. At least 75 downloads of the Afrikaans spell checkers. So now we actually have some idea that people are grabing this stuff.

A simple sum: 100 downloads * 12 months * R3 000 = R3,6 million that some savy South African computer users have saved by using OpenOffice.org.

We have upstreamed the Translate.org.za spell checkers to OpenOffice.org. This we hope will give them more exposure, it makes them available to the DictOOo install wizard and we hope will result in more Linux distributions including them in their packages.

Many of these spell checkers are experimental and development will continue at Translate.org.za and be published on the dictionary downloads pages or the actual download diretories.

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.

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.