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.

Virtaal, a Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tool, has been providing translators with Machine Translation suggestions through its plugin system. We've just committed a new Machine Translation plugin that allows Virtaal to use Microsoft Translator's new Haitian Creole translation engine.

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?

With the release of Virtaal 0.5.0 I've had a little bit of time to reflect on this tool.

Virtaal is a CAT (Computer Assisted Translation) tool, a tool designed to help human translators translate more effectively. From the comments we get from various localisers they're loving Virtaal, they're working much more quickly then they have on any other tool.

Translation Memory, everything that you've translated in the past, is an amazing resource. But like all technology to assist a translator it is only useful if it is quick and easy to use.

Yes 10 African languages for Firefox. Officially there is 1 (one) African language (Afrikaans) in Firefox, not counting languages of wider communication like English, French, Portuguese and Arabic.

Google has just added 7 new languages to their machine translation service, taking the total to 41.

I've submitted a patch to libtranslate which will make it work with these languages.

I'm sure everyone has written about this... Might as well help to ensure that people can quickly find a solution.

env LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype

Place that in your launch icon for Skype.  Or drop the 'env' and run it from the command line.  You should drop into Skype's option dialog->Video and test.  Hopefully you now have shiny video in Skype

Someone asked on the translate-devel list about integrating something like libtranslate into Virtaal. What a great idea! Except, its already done and then I realised I hadn't told anyone about it outside of the devel lists. So let me tell you what I did.