Translate.org.za Development Blog

After months of work on getting Firefox 3 out in Afrikaans, I believe we are now almost there. Beta 5, 6 and RC-1 released with Afrikaans, and the feedback so far is quite nice. People have already been bugging us about updating the spell checker, so there are definitely a few people who seem to have switched already (not just testing). Seth Bindernagel from Mozilla is asking for some people that worked on Firefox 3 localisations to write a bit about themselves and all the work that went into preparing the localised versions of Firefox 3. I am quite interested to read similar stories by other contributors, so I’m happy to oblige.

To give people an idea of the timelines, the discussions for translating Firefox 3 Beta 1 started in the middle of November 2007. Considering that we’re only now (May 2008) close to release, this is quite a bit of work - not just the actual translation, but all the planning of l10n issues around the beta releases, organising teams, etc. The Afrikaans team only really started working on translations in the beginning of March. At this time, most of the English text would have been stabilised, so this provides a safe starting point to start our work on without having to redo a lot of work.

Dwayne migrated the PO files for Firefox 2 to the POT files for Firefox 3, and as usual, Samuel Murray did most of the translations, and often under quite difficult timelines, in order to meet the deadlines for specific betas. Beta 5 was the first stage where we officially joined in the testing cycle, and our translations were quite complete and tested for Beta 6. Dwayne and I work fulltime at Translate.org.za in Pretoria (South Africa). I’m a developer and in charge of all our current development projects, including Pootle and the Translate Toolkit. We don’t currently have any funding to work on the translations during office hours, so we all try to get to this during our off hours. When we started with Firefox 3, we (Samuel) had to translate 6 274 words, and had to review 1248 words from fuzzy translations (the total for Firefox 3 is over 26 200 words). This is quite a lot of work to fit in in-between other obligations, but Samuel is not your average translator! Using our updated PO files, his magic tools (mostly WordFast) and translation memories, he reached the important deadlines, and handed over to me to take care of review. We both had to work quite late one specific evening to get the last things done! (Baie dankie, Samuel!)

For non-UI review we mostly use pofilter and poconflicts. Samuel is really good, so luckily there wasn’t a lot of work here. Still it is nice to know that the first translated build will work, and tinderbox will be green after check-in to CVS. Then we do the in-context or UI review, and here it becomes much easier to involve the testing community. Unfortunately resizing dialogue boxes remain one of the biggest time wasters at this stage, while we really want to be reviewing translations. I always sit thinking how nobody had to review dialogue sizes for the 40 000+ strings for translating GNOME. Multiply that with the number of supported languages! (In case you missed it, it is still zero seconds that translators of all languages had to spend on resizing dialogue boxes for GNOME.)

The rest of the work involved work on customising search engines, in-product pages, protocol handlers, etc. Some of these were discussed at length on the Afrikaans mailing list to find meaningful links to suggest on the “getting started” page, etc. I really hope that this will give the Afrikaans users a sense of Firefox being “their own” and hopefully, one day we will hopefully be allowed to provide an official South African English build with equally useful customisations. I was disappointed at what a low priority translations like ours have at some of the web services where we tried to get Afrikaans translations deployed in time for Firefox 3. I really wanted to provide an Afrikaans RSS protocol handler, for example. In the end we will still provide some of the English defaults, but any reasonably translated one will probably take my vote in future.

In future, I really hope we can get more people involved, and also at earlier stages of the whole process. And outside of the products like Firefox and Thunderbird, things like the support website, add-ons, etc. all still need to be translated, so the work is by no means done. If you want to help us do the same for the other South African languages, be sure to get in touch with us to discuss some plans.

Translate.org.za recently decided to work more closely with the upstream OpenOffice.org localisation process. In many ways this is partly because OpenOffice.org will be adopting Pootle to allow online translation for all localisation projects. But also because we’d like people going to the OpenOffice.org site to know about the Afrikaans translations.

As a result of this we now have our own Afrikaans project website which is directly accessible from the multilingual OpenOffice.org download page.

We are also now part of the official build process for localized efforts of OpenOffice.org and the first Afrikaans build already appeared in one of the recent 2.3 milestones.

The purpose of these builds are to allow testing of the localizations, so feel free to install and test this. We value your feedback.

We are still committed to providing our multilingual builds, but will either work a way to integrate those into the current process or build them as needed following official releases.

A fully localised computer lab, including the state of the art translations available for all 11 South African languages, has recently been set up at Rhodes University. This was an initiative within the SANTED (South African - Norwegian Tertiary Education Development) Programme in the School of Languages (African Languages Section), in collaboration with the Telkom Centre of Excellence in the Department of Computer Science.

The lab, hosted by the School of Languages, counts 30 machines, all dual-boot Windows and Linux (Ubuntu, of course). It features most of the software developed by Translate and hosted at http://downloads.translate.org.za. This includes all available localisations for OpenOffice, FireFox and Thunderbird, as well as spell-checkers for all languages and the SA keyboard. With the help of Friedel and Andrew (Rhodes IT) we also created nice shortcuts to switch language for OpenOffice in Windows. On the Linux side, Gnome is available in Afrikaans, Sesotho sa Leboa, isiXhosa and isiZulu.

This is the first computer lab at a South African tertiary institution to allow students to operate computers almost entirely in their language. We really hope to see similar initiatives springing up at other institutions.

We’ve also updated our translations for South African English, which will also see the light of day in 2.0.0.1. Some may ask why do we need SA English? Technically we don’t since it should be the same as British English. But having our own gives us a number of flexibilities: we can contribute our South African English spell checker - which is very different from British, it allows us to deviate slightly from British English, iit makes it easier for us to distribute translations and it allows other minor customisations (non done yet) that would be South Africa specific.

Our translation update for Afrikaans that targeted Firefox 2.0.0.1 have been approved. We’re not exactly sure when they will be released but we’ll have test builds up soon.

After some testing pootle.translate.org.za has finally been upgraded to Pootle 0.10.1. This means more cool features such as project description on the project page, improved documentation, etc.

Vincent Mahlangu, who recently volunteered to translate Tux Paint into Ndebele, has just completed the translations. We hope that these will make the next release.

Update: the Ndebele translations appear in TuxPaint RC5

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.

Now that we have sorted out our migration to SVN we are beginning to migrate our translations to Firefox 2.0 (and also for Thudnerbird 2.0).  We’re starting with Afrikaans and will see how that goes.  The tools are picking up some problems which I hope will be sorted out soon.

After we migrate we will work at getting the translation up on Pootle.

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.