Translate.org.za Development Blog

Readers might have noticed that this blog has not seen much activity for a while. In reality the Translate.org.za people have been doing quite a bit of blogging on their individual blogs.  Read more from Dwayne, Friedel (and in Afrikaans) and Walter.

We’ve started migrating our translations for Mozilla Firefox 3. The first language migrated is Afrikaans which is still only at 68% translated, we hope to get to 100% relatively quickly. Our aim is to ensure that Afrikaans is part of the official release. Our other languages we will take one by one through the official process.

We would appreciate testing of these Afrikaans builds even with such low translation status as it will help identify problems early. All the development builds will be available from:

http://download.translate.org.za/dev/firefox/

You can identify your language from the language code. There are also language packs so you can install a certain language and add other language packs.

There are Mac, Windows and Linux builds.

Since Mozilla added the ability to expose language packs on their download page, we’ve decided to get all of our languages there.

For now these are all in the sandbox, which means they are in testing and need review.  Please review them, but be aware of the following known issues:

1. Not everything is translated: these are simply migrations of Firefox 1.5 translations to 2.0 so unfortunately these things  are not all translated.
2. Setting dialogue is mostly untranslated: Firefox 2.0 saw a major revamp of that interface, see point 1.
3. All HTML errors are in English: same as above

We would appreciate your help in fixing any of these errors or course.  If you are a professional translator, language student, passionate about your language then you can use our web translation tool to help us add the missing entries or correct any mistakes.

For your download pleasure here are all the language packs:

• Afrikaans
• English (South African)
• Ndebele
• Northern Sotho
• Southern Sotho
• Swati
• Tsonga
• Tswana
• Venda
• Xhosa
• Zulu

The South African English spell checker for Firefox and Thunderbird is now officialy reviewed and available for download.

Many thanks to all those who tested it.  Friedel picked up a showstopper right at the beginning, phew.  We’re getting a few thousand downloads a week so somebody likes what we’ve done.

The South African English spell checker has just entered testing for Firefox and Thunderbird. We need your help to get it live.

To help please:

1. Download and install the spell checker. In Firefox this will automagically install the checker.
2. Thunderbird: you will first need to save the file to your computer and then from within Thunderbird add the checker: Tools -> Addons -> Install…
3. Now use the checker
4. Please provide a review - we need these to go live and of course if you see any bugs please report them to us. You can add them as comments to this posting.

Previously we mentioned that we had fixed the Linux locales so that they now correctly specify the outgoing international dialing prefix as 00, in the past it was 09. These have been committed to glibc and make their way to your Linux desktop soon.

A new version of the Afrikaans spell checker for Firefox and Thunderbird has been released.  If you already have it intalled then it should be automatically updated, otherwise you can download the checker.

Now we have OpenOffice.org 2.2.1 in Afrikaans, there has been a lot of work to get our OpenOffice.org work updated and released along with the latest versions of the software.

With the release of 2.2.1 we’ve seen our translations migrated and updated, we’re not 100% translated, but you’ll probably never meet those untranslated messages.  We currently sit at about 96%.

Release 2.2.1 addresses a number of security issues so we recommend that you give it a try.