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One problem we’ve found with Joomfish is that although it tells you if an article is out of date it can’t tell you which part is out of date of the changes.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.

We have just launched the Translate.org.za Wiki that we hope to use for gathering information relating to the various South African localisation projects currently taking place. This is an area for the coordination and documentation of any South Africa related FOSS localisation.  This will help staff and volunteers coordinate efforts and help to avoid duplicate work, etc.

The Translate.org.za Wiki is different than the Translate Wiki on SourceForge.  The SourceForge Wiki is now used to document the tools originally developed by Translate.org.za (Translate Toolkit and Pootle) which are now part of the Wordforge project and no longer for South African localisations.