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.