Friedel en ander frappanthede

The Translate project recently released version 2.1.0 of Pootle. Pootle is a web based system for translation and translation management. It is widely used for translation crowd-sourcing.

This is a major new release after a long period of development. It has many new features that I wanted to write about. It saw about a thousand commits since version 2.0 which excludes all the improvements to the Translate Toolkit.

This work was made possible by many volunteers and our funders:

• ANLoc, funded by IDRC

Highlighted improvements

News about performance:

• Faster translate page
• Faster searching
• Faster uploads
• Improved concurrency
• Reduced memory consumption

For users

• Design improvements all over Pootle
• Redesign of the translate page
  • Better layout presenting more useful information
  • Clicking on XML tags inserts them
  • Quality checks are shown on the translate page
  • Reviewers can remove incorrect checks to avoid reviewing them again
  • Automatic scrolling to the action on the translate page
  • Machine translation from the source or alternative languages
• All users can now remove their own suggestions
• Extraction of frequently occurring terms (based on poterminology)
• Add, remove and modify terms for standardisation in the project
• On upload, the user can specify the target file or directory
• Better handling of ZIP files uploaded with an extra directory level

Formats

• Support for monolingual formats without conversion
  • Java properties
  • Mac OSX strings
  • PHP arrays
  • Subtitle files
• Support for Haiku catkeys
• Support across all formats for offline translation in XLIFF
• Support for reviewing suggestions offline with the XLIFF alt-trans tag

For administrators

• A new admin dashboard with more useful information about the server
• A new contact form for translators to contact administrators
• When assigning permissions, users are grouped by their interests
• Row highlighting to help in several administrative tasks
• Captcha support to combat spam
• Several new commands for batch command-line administration
• News page and RSS feed for projects
• Automatic news items when users join a language or project team
• Project level permissions overriding others and allowing even better delegation
• New project languages are initialised from templates if nothing is present on the file system
• A new field for the project's source language simplify some management and allows new features

Notes for server administrators

• Pootle no longer depends on statsdb and SQLite
• Files on disk are only synced with the database on download or commit. The old behaviour can be restored at the cost of performance. A manage.py command can sync to files on the command line.
• The database is now much larger. This should have no negative impact on performance, but we strongly suggest using MySQL or PostgreSQL for the best performance.
• Pootle 2.1 will upgrade the database automatically from Pootle 2.0 installations. You need to have South installed. Install it from your distribution, or with "easy_install South" (the upgrade could take some time, depending on your installation)
• Pending files are not used for suggestions any more, and will also be migrated to the database during upgrade.
• New settings are available in localsettings.py - compare your existing one to the new one
• Pootle 1 installations can easily migrate everything excluding project permissions. We encourage administrators to configure permissions with the new permission system which is much simpler to use, since permissions on the language and project level are now supported.
• Have a look at the optimisation guide to ensure your Pootle runs as fast as it can.

To see Pootle in action, or for further translation updates, go to http://pootle.locamotion.org/