Translate.org.za Development Blog

Work has started to change the Translate.org.za website into a multilingual site. The site uses Joomla and we are using the Joomfish extension. Visitors should now see a dropdown allowing them to choose their preferred language, if their browser didn’t indicate their preference correctly. (See this article on how to set it.) Currently the pilot involves Afrikaans and we would appreciate feedback on this. We realise that not everything is translated yet, so no need to report that

Thanks to:

• Charl who got Joomfish up and running and who is fixing the website to make it all localisable. Funny how a project focused on localisation can get that wrong!
• Samuel for translating Joomla into Afrikaans. This gives us the Joomla specific entries in Afrikaans, as apposed to the content.
• Friedel who has translated most of the front page and the product blurbs into Afrikaans. I’m sure he’d appreciate your translation criticism.

One problem we’ve found with Joomfish is that although it tells you if an article is out of date it can’t tell you which part is out of date of the changes. This can be frustrating with very long articles. But generally it is usable.

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.

Xhosa and Venda have been added to TuxPaint and should be in release 0.9.16rc2, we just missed rc1 but I assume it will be available from the same place when rc2 is finally released. A new volunteer began working on the Ndelebe translation of TuxPaint. We will make a front page announcement once there is something that people can download and enjoy.

We translated TuxPaint into Xhosa and Venda during this year’s Software Freedom Day. Work is continuing on Pootle to update the translations for the latest release of TuxPaint and to get some other translations done. A new version of TuxPaint is due out shortly and we hope to be included in that release.