We're continuing to translate Firefox on Pootle. Just added are Venda, Ndonga (a dialect of Owambo) and Heroro.

This takes us up to 17 African languages being localised on Pootle. The levels of activity vary from super active to still gotta get off the ground. Seven are released in Firefox, three are waiting review (Wolof, Fulah and Acoli).

There has been quite some activity in Uganda with regard to localising Firefox.

The Lugandan teams had a Firefox launch last week (29 September 2011). I sent them a video congratulating them on their work.

With the addition of Lusoga we're now translating 13 Firefox languages on Pootle. Some of these are official Firefox translations and some are yet to move out of Aurora into the normal Mozilla process. We started with 4 a little over a year ago, so a growth to 13 is really encouraging.

Do you hve a nice shiny Mac or iPhone app that you want to translate? Now you can easily manage the localisation of Mac OS X .strings files with translators using common open source PO editing tools.

I'll post a little later about using Pootle to allow you to do web-based community localisation of the same strings files.

Firefox Home become the motivator

I missed out a post on Virtaal 0.6.0 so I'll wrap both the major and 0.6.1 bugfix release together. For those not in the know, Virtaal is our Computer Aided Translation Tool (CAT) that we've been developing as part of the ANLoc project.

Our aim in Virtaal continues to be to have a simple clean interface, yet to present powerful features to translators. We seem to be doing the right thing when you read the following comments from a recent review of Virtaal, "It’s clean interface and ease of use are the best virtues of this application. ... there [are] NO extra buttons, and the layout looks like a side-by-side sheet presentation. Beautiful. It also allows access to machine translation services such as Google, Moses and Opentran. Other features include highlighted diffs between the translation memory suggestions, a don’t-touch-your-mouse approach, and much more."

In Virtaal, our desktop Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tool, we've have a number of usability goals. One of those is trying to limit the configuration required to use the tool. Most of us think nothing about setting the target translation language in our CAT tool when requested. But we've always asked the question, can't the CAT tool work this out itself?

In this post I'll talk about how we've been able to correctly determine the target language for about 87% of the localisation files on a typical Linux system.

At Translate.org.za we want to keep delivering the best FOSS localisation tools. To do that we've started using Continuous Integration (CI) in the development of Pootle, Virtaal and the Translate Toolkit. We're using a tool called Hudson to manage our CI process.

Since the tools that we develop are all focused on localisation we thought, "Wouldn't it be great if we could use CI to continuously check our translations?". I hope that you will start to use some of our scripts, or your own, to ensure that localisation is part of your CI build process.

What did it take to allow Pootle, our web-based localisation platform to support Qt Linguist (.ts), TMX and TBX formats?

Three lines of code!

Translate.org.za are the proud parents of a new Zulu spell checker.

What makes us such proud parents? We've ported the spell checker from the Myspell platform to Hunspell. Which means what exactly? It means that we can now spell check Zulu text at much higher precision. It also puts the platform in place to ratchet up the checkers performance.

Mondli Makhanya, editor of the Sunday Times (South Africa), raises an interesting point about Afrikaners and language in his piece, "Afrikaners set a fine example in championing their language".

While Mondli places much of the blame on government, and I would agree that there is much blame that can be placed on government's shoulders, is it not the speakers of a language who carry the greatest responsibility? While the Afrikaners are concerned about this issue where are the Zulus, Vendas and Tswanas?