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.

For me Virtaal is all about power and simplicity. Lets provide the most powerful features to the translator while allowing them to focus fully on the task of translation. We don't ask them to do massive configuration before they can even translate, rather we wait to ask them when we really need that piece of information.

Here are some of the new features that I'm loving in Virtaal 0.5.0:

• Autoterm provides terminology files for Virtaal to download and use. You didn't know there was an Urdu localisation terminology list? Out hope is that this puts good terminology into localisers hands.
• Web look-up allows you to look-up some selected text on websites. Tired of copying text, launching your web-browser and querying? Then simply select the text, right click and choose what search engine to use.
• Highlighting of differences in non-100% TM matches.
• New plugins for machine translation with Google and Moses. We've added these two on top of the existing Apertium machine translation.
• Language identification for easier selection of language pairs. For the inner geek in me. We will now identify the source and target text if the file format doesn't tell us. Its helpful for someone like me that is often changing between various target languages.

That's just a scratching of the surface. I hope to give some more details in future posts.