Friedel en ander frappanthede

Djihed Afifi recently wrote a nice web blog entry about his dream of bringing the current FOSS translation management tools together. Instead of replying there in full, I thought his post probably deserves a more thorough reply.

He gives an overview of all the major translation management tools in the FOSS world (and even includes Rosetta) and then explains how an ideal tool should combine features from several of these tools. My summary of what he mentions:

• Projects can use it with or without upstream's help
• Version control integration
• Work reservation and workflow
• Statistics
• Online and offline translation
• Translation memory
• Terminology assistance
• Different access levels to distinguish between experience levels

Other features he mentions are plug-ins, a public API, and what I'd call activity or community statistics.

There are a few interesting things to notice here. These are all really about the language as the project (not the upstream project as the main focus). This has mostly been Pootle's focus and one of its strengths. There is also a huge emphasis on things to make localisers more productive and to achieve higher quality. The features that Pootle support already touch on almost each of these issues, and provides several over and above these. (I link to some of the pages describing the Pootle features above.) Due to the contributions by Mozilla, the current development version even has a list of active contributors, which we didn't have before. Our support for version control is not mentioned in Djihed's comparison. Our handling of version control updates is really ideal for team work and less skilled users where conflicts are handled by Pootle to allow people to continue working meaningfully. Pootle's quality checks and statistics are also underrated in my opinion.

Another interesting thing to note is that almost all of the applications are migrating to the Django web framework. This doesn't mean that things will just automatically work together, but it is interesting in what possibilities arise. Open-Tran.eu and Rosetta already uses the Translate Toolkit used by Pootle, and several of the tools authors have talked to each other about collaboration. I personally met Dimitris Glezoz earlier this year at FOSDEM.

I think his blog post is a nice dream which we share, and I think we will see good things arising in 2009 for FOSS localisation.