Friedel en ander frappanthede

I recently had to do a slightly harder bit of translation work for Pidgin. Part of it was an extension for the XMPP protocol to standardise emotions. With this extension different chat programs can exchange information about the user's mood in a standard way. But the text shown to the user should of course be translated, and this ended up not being easy at all.

My colleague Dwayne just wrote an interesting piece about the use of continuous integration for testing our product translations. Now I want to start thinking about how we can extend it with pofilter.

I saw on a few places people writing about OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) that now (additionally) uses Hunspell for the system wide spell checker. If it is the truth, Apple is hiding it very well — a search for "Hunspell" on their web site barely returns anything. But it is interesting to see that OSX is using Hunspell, and that OSX has a system wide spell checker based on Hunspell before GNOME does.

I read yesterday about Panopticlick which tries to determine how easily web users can be traced without the use of web cookies. It collects information sent by the browser in the HTTP protocol, and things that can be collected by means of JavaScript, Flash and Java. The website reports that my web browser is unique in the pool of browsers that visited Panopticlick.

With the recent release of Pootle 2.0 I want to write a bit about some of the nice features that Pootle offers. Pootle empowers translation teams to more easily do their work, and to improve quality. Where there might be differing skill levels (for example with crowd-sourcing), these functions are of crucial importance.

Yesterday the Translate team released version 2.0.0 of Pootle. Pootle is web based system for translation and translation management. It is widely used for crowd-sourcing, especially in the world of Free Software.

This is a major new release after a long period of development. It has many new features, and Pootle is now built on a completely new web platform (Django).

I was recently interviewed about the Translate Toolkit. It was published on the SourceForge community blog. Apart from the useful tools that form part of the Translate Toolkit, it is of course also a fantastic platform / API for the development of new programs that have to do with translation, so I'm quite happy about the exposure there. Read the article here.

This is part of my series on podebug. Last time we looked at identifying strings from different locations. This time I decided to conduct an interview with Rail Aliev who has been a major user of and contributor to podebug. I was specifically interested in his use of the hashing functionality of podebug, but hopefully you will also get to know this major contributor to the world of Free and Open Source Software.

Google is constantly extending its software for automatic machine translation. A new set of languages that was recently added, includes Afrikaans and Swahili. This is the first two languages from Africa that is added to the list. This is interesting for several reasons, and I'm wondering how this can change the landscape for these two languages.

A while ago I started with a series on pseudolocalisation in podebug. I showed how one can test translatability of a program with the xxx rule, and the final picture showed what it looks like when a string from another file is involved. Let's have a look at a way that translations from different files can be recognised more easily.