Translate.org.za Development Blog

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.

Just for those of you who don’t read tectonic or Translate.org.za’s own front page. Afrikaans is officially in Firefox 2.0.0.4. Thanks need to go to:

• Samuel Murray - who updated the older translations so that we were 100% translated.
• Schalk Heunis - who reported a major character encoding bug in earlier test versions that resulted in some CSS errors.
• Friedel Wolff - who fixed and discovered some serious bugs, reviewed the releases, translated some last minute strings and managed the process with Mozilla.
• Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla contributors - we’d really have nothing without their hard work.

This was a long process, we’ve been in beta for over 2 releases. But we are very happy that this is a high quality release.

Now we need to look at the other 10 languages and see how we can get those released.

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.

We’ve just uploaded South African builds of Firefox. We now have version 1.5.0.11, this solves the encoding bug picked up earlier this month. You can download XPIs or Windows .exe.

I’m usually suspect of machine translation. Its gets most things wrong in my opinion, but then again it is useful for getting the gist of a paragraph.

Andreas has been working with people from Apertium, doing MT form English to Afrikaans and back. Hard but then also not hard in that Afrikaans and English are related. You can give the it a whirl in their test environment. How about trying “Ek is ‘n boer”, you’ll notice its actually very good at Inglish

We’re excited about this as the potential for close languages like the Nguni and Sotho groups of languages is very good.

As you might or might not know the international dialing prefix for outgoing international calls changed from 09 to 00 recently. You didn’t know? Try dialing 09 now and see how far you get.

To make sure our glibc locale data is up to date we released a new version of the locales. Actually its just English that needs to change as all the other 10 inherit the telephone section from it.

What does this mean? Not much, except that applications that get the international select code from the locale will now get South Africa’s correct. For us its also a simple indicator that free software really is empowering. We’ve changed this we haven’t had to wait for work arounds while someone feeds this up to the powers that be.

You can download the new locale data package (you need to know what you’re doing) or track the glibc bug.

A rather strange and spurious bug in the Afrikaans Firefox has a fix, we’re just waiting for approval.

For those who must know the bug worked a bit like this… If the page you where wanting to view didn’t have an encoding set then Firefox tries the default encoding as set for your language. In Afrikaans we use ISO-8859-1. The only problem is it was specified as ‘ISO 8859-1′ - not the missing dash before 8859.

Thanks go to Schalk Heunis who gave us a report that allowed us to start the search.

The fix should go into Firefox 2.0.0.4 for Afrikaans. We hope to point you to some nightly builds to check the fix for us.

You can also fix it in your current version by doing the following:

• Browse to: about:config
• Search for: intl.charset.default
• Change it t: ISO-8859-1 (note the dash, the current entry has a space)

When we added the extra Venda characters, ḓṱḽṋṅ, to the DejaVu font we were newbies.  Needless to say the diacritics didn’t all line up correctly.  Ouch.  This looked really bad when viewed in large sizes when doing a demo.

At a recent conference Dwayne met with Denis Jacquerye, a DejaVu font contributor.  He volunteered to fix the problem and those fixes appeared in r1626 and r1627.  These should appear in DejaVu 2.16, which is scheduled to be released on 1 April.

We’re still not official and are still in beta. The biggest problem that we are aware of is that our dialogue sizes are still wrong in some places. Yes it sucks in that we have to manually change these and retest and Mozilla seems unable to work this out itself as other toolkits do

But you can get the release and it should magically upgrade if you installed 2.0.0.2. Please help us identify any dialogues that are not the correct size so that we can correc them and that hopefully we’ll see 2.0.0.4 being the official release of Firefox in Afrikaans.

Download 2.0.0.3 in Afrikaans for Windows, Linux or Mac.

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.