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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.