Translate.org.za Development Blog

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.

What does this mean for you?  We’re not sure ourselves!  We use the orthography files from fontconfig in a small tool used by the Deja Vu font team that can analyse a font to arrive at a percentage coverage for various languages. With this tool we can quickly check if a font covers Afrikaans, Venda, Tswana and Northern Sotho.

Our guess is that font-config itself uses these orthography files in its algorithm for font substitution.  For instance if a font does not have Venda characters it can find a font that does cover the Venda characters and use that for the missing glyphs.

In our bug report we added some missing South African languages and fixed the entry for Tswana which didn’t include the Šš characters.

We managed to get the Afrikaans localisation for Firefox in with version 2.0.0.2. It is not an official download yet, we were only upgraded to “beta” status. Hopefully we will be an official release in the next version of Firefox. Please download this and test it. This release means that it should update automatically in future without breaking the translations. Download this version for Windows, Linux (i686), and Mac OS X (universal binary).

We’ve just submitted a bug to GNOME which adds character pickers for Afrikaans and a seperate one for Venda, Tswana and Northern Sotho.

What does this mean? Character Picker is a GNOME applet, its sits on the GNOME taskbar and displays a small list of buttons.  Useful if your keyboard doesn’t have those characters and you’re not sure how to type them.  In South Africa there are a number of people who need to type a few characters who find the keyboard difficult to understand or don’t want to mess with their keyboard.

Of course we have a keyboard!  But this is just a nice to have little extra. We certainly will find it useful as although we have keyboards setup sometime we simply need the list of characters easily accesible.

Just got an email from Matthias Klose, developer for Ubuntu and packager of the Ubuntu OpenOffice.org packages.  He’s looking at our spellcheckers for inclusion in Ubuntu.  We’re solving a few build problems with him but hopefully soon we’ll see all our checkers on a Linux computer near you.  Thanks Matthias.

Whose blogging in your language? No one it seems. We’ve just set up planets for all the official languages of South Africa. So that we can pull all the mother-tongue blogs together.

What is a planet? Well it is simply a page that pulls stories via RSS from various blogs. But its easier to understand if you look at the Afrikaans planet (one of our staff decided that the correct translation for bloggers in Afrikaans should be boernaliste - we’ll wait for someone to take offence)

The results? Rather disappointing. There seem to be lots of blogs in Afrikaans, we haven’t added 1% of what we’ve seen. In the other languages? Nada. We found one Sotho blog… all in English. One Xhosa blog that seemed to have died some time in the past. Come on guys start blogging.

Found a blog that we need to add? Please email it to info@translate.org.za.

There are a number of ways to guess languages. Why would you want to do that? Well if you have a piece of test you might want to know what language it is written in. The Sonnet project (building a spell checking framework for KDE) is using it to guess the language of your text so that it can adjust its operation to spell check in the appropriate language.

We’ve just submitted the data needed to guess the remaining South African languages. So that when Sonnet becomes part of KDE4 it will guess South African languages correctly.

New versions of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird was posted to the site. Both are now at 1.5.0.9. Afrikaans and South African English versions of Firefox 2.0 are available for testing. Those interested in the status of the official inclusion of these two locales in Firefox, would be happy to know that we foresee both to make it into Firefox 2.0.0.2. You can follow the bugs in the Mozilla bugs database if you like, for example this one.

We’ve been contacted by the .ZA domain name authority for input as to whether South Africa needs to allow the registration of doamins with non-ASCII characters found in our languages. Generally Translate.org.za supports this but we are unaware of the consequence in terms of fishing or confusion for users.

We’ve just completed the migration of the translations at pootle.translate.org.za from CVS to Subversion. This now completes our migration off of the translate.sourceforge.net project into our own zaf.sourceforge.net project. This should make it easier to get translations contributed by the community back into Subversion at ZAF.