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.

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!

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.

You might want to call this an announcement of sorts.  This is something that has been brewing in my mind for many years now, its just that I got irritated, found the time, sat down and began writing and planning.

Virtaal is now packaged for Fedora.  The real thing i.e. it will appear in the Fedora repository.  The packages are waiting to be pushed to stable for Fedora 9 and 10. Please download and test these builds (F-9 or F-10).

I'm hoping to build versions for EL4 and EL5 but I'm in no rush for those.

Well not really :)

The Translate Toolkit has been packaged for Fedora for a while now, what I've done is update to v1.2 (with v1.2.1 in the pipeline) for both Fedora 10, 9, RHEL 5 and OLPC.  This is the groundwork needed to get first Virtaal and then Pootle into Fedora.