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.