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."

So what did we add to 0.6.* version of Virtaal? Let's have a look.

Welcome to Virtaal's welcome area

The most notable change in Virtaal 0.6.0 is the new welcome area. In early versions of Virtaal new users where faced with the "What now" thought as they opened the tool and faced a blank screen. Since Virtaal has a very clean interface there aren't any hints about what the application does. There are no unused panes for TM or glossary entries. We realised that we could actually make use of this space to enhance usability and help newbies. In true Virtaal fashion we avoided adding a splash screen or tip of the day dialogue. What we developed is the following welcome screen and we hope that you like it.

The welcome screen is not meant to be just a pretty face, we wan it to be really useful for the translator. As you can see it gives easy access to previous translations, guides and other help so both the seasoned translator and the newbie are easily and quickly helped.

We hope to add other features to the welcome screen in future versions, hopefully emerging as a dashboard of sorts where we can show the state of work and activities currently in progress.

New and improved Machine Translation plugins

We added support for Microsoft Translator (or Bing Translator as they sometimes call it). You may recall that we did a special release of this plugin on Windows to allow translators to translate into Haitian Creole at the time of the Haitian earthquake. A recent study comparing Google, Yahoo's Babelfish and Microsoft Bing MT solutions seems to indicate that for short texts that Microsoft and Yahoo may offer better results.

We've supported Apertium, the FOSS rule-based Machine Translation engine, for a long time now. Apertium recently created a new service API that mostly mimics Google's MT API. We've adapted the Virtaal plugin to use this new API. While most other MT engines are statistical based, Apertium uses a rule based approach. For the languages that Apertium supports it might present better MT suggestions then statistical MT services.

Improved format support

Virtaal uses the Translate Toolkit to provide support for various localisation formats. With this release we now integrate support for OmegaT glossary files, you can now edit these directly in Virtaal instead of in a spreadsheet or wordprocessor. We hope this leads to more reuse of terminology.

An XLIFF file can provide alt-trans entries and Virtaal will now display these in the suggestion dropdown. In the screenshot below you can see the suggested translation as the first entry provided by user 'admin'.

When you are working in Pootle with XLIFF files you will now be able to review suggestions off-line. XLIFF files supplied to you might also contain alt-trans entries with MT and TM suggestions, these can now also be seen when you translate.

In case you've forgotten Virtaal can edit Qt Linguists .ts files, thus you can translate pretty much any FOSS applications in Virtaal. With this release we fixed some bugs relating to plural support in newer TS files so we should be able to manage any file currently in the wild.

New languages, improved language features and language related bugs

A translation tool that isn't itself translated! We're proud to see a growing number of people contributing translations to Virtaal. We've added: Bulgarian, Icelandic and Thai and of course many other translations have been updated. Virtaal is now translated into 40 languages.

Virtaal running with Translate Toolkit, versions > 1.7.0, is able to detect your target language based on the 'Language-Team' header entry in your PO files. So your language pair selection is almost always going to be just correct.

We now have better interaction with the Voikko backend of Enchant and improved autocorrect data for Polish (yes we do autocorrect using OpenOffice.org data files). We've also added a workaround for GNOME bug 569581 (Windows US intl layout, Afrikaans 'n).

Accessibility

We worked hard in this release to make sure that Virtaal works well in high contrast modes to assist people with visual disabilities.

The following before and after pictures show the changes in a High Contrast Inverse theme. While the changes are small it's worth realising that the tool was unusable for someone needing inverse colour schemes in order to use a computer. You will notice that the text input area is now properly rendering as light on dark. You can't see it here but we also made sure that the placeable colours, placeable highlighting and terminology colours all now work in inverse.

A raft of bugfixes and small features

• Virtaal has a very good system to handle placeables. We've now made it possible to select placeables from the plural in the source as well as to cycle through the placeables back to selecting the whole source text after you've moved through all placeables.
• Support for proxy servers - Virtaal just didn't work in university labs, hopefully this provides enough support for most cases.
• Reduced flickering in the editing area - stepping through large units in Virtaal produced too much flicker, now we will be gentle on the eye.
• Use the most frequent word as autocomplete suggestion - we just weren't giving you the best autocomplete suggestion all the time, now we do.
• Better handling of errors in the Open-Tran service - Open-Tran.eu has been down quite a lot recently and we get a few XMLRPC errors, these are now all caught.

You can read the release notes for other minor bugs that were fixed in 0.6.0 and 0.6.1.