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Pootle hack week

Ever get tired of hacking on the same stuff? Me too. Which is why at Translate we've introduced a hack-week. The rules are simple, you get a week to work on whatever you want that relates to Pootle, Virtaal, Amagama and Tranlate Toolkit.

The week run from 24 Sep to 28 Sep and You can join us! Yip we're quite happy to have anyone hacking on anything in Pootle and friends. Now would be a good time to get help as our coders are more available. Join us on #pootle and tell us what you'd like to hack on (it doesn't need to be code, docs, bug triage, testing are all good candidates).

We're tracking the hack week as part of a Scrum iteration.

So for my hack week I'm looking at:

1. A review of all Pootle documentation. Cleanup, rewrite, add, etc. And I hope figure out some way to make localised screenshots.
2. Implement a Sphinx localisation process.

I think docs are a critical part of good software and I'm hoping to grab Pootle by the bootstraps and get her docs back into order. My task is helped by the fact that Julen moved our docs off our wiki into the code.

Other things on the radar are:

• Landing pages for all the tools - the doc meme again. Julen is running with this.
• Optimising Amagama our Translation Memory server. When you want to import every FOSS localisation or you want to experiment with different matching strategies then you can't wait around for a day. Friedel is playing with this and I think he's excited about what he'll be able to do with Amagama with a really fast import.

So let me leave you as I go and have some fun hacking.

Firefox is now Fulah

It's always great to see new African languages appear in Firefox. Now we've added Fulah.

Mozilla put out a great blog post, "Empowerment and localization" congratulating, amongst others, Ibrahima SARR the man behind the Fulah effort.

Ibrahima is one of the language teams that we help over at the Firefox Pootle server.

I don't think I've seen many people work so hard. He has worked tirelessly on this effort, and I do mean tirelessly, as I see translations at 1am and emails at about the same time!

In his own words, @dwaynebailey I worked hard but also was made more efficient by Pootle and Virtaal which I recommend to everybody with localization plans!

Since that has always been our aim, to make localisation easier, it is wonderful to see it in action. By making it easier we've freed up more time for Ibrahima to do more testing, grow the Fulah user community, and expand the localisation for Fulah.

Now go get some sleep Ibrahima!

Interesting Spanish article on PO files and Virtaal

An interesting paper about translating PO files and about Virtaal appeared in the Spanish magazine "Traditori" (page 47-51). The magazine seems to be edited by translators. Thanks Lucía Morado for sharing the link.

Nice to get a surprise review of our simple to use, yet powerful, GTK+ CAT tool.

Better, faster, more lovely Pootle - with thanks to Mozilla

Pootle, Translate's online translation engine, is used by Mozilla (rebranded as Verbatim), LibreOffice and many more. Users include FOSS projects, NGOs and commercial software vendors. Mozilla has contracted Translate, the developers of Pootle, to bring a number of improvements to the platform.

Verbatim is used to translate the following Mozilla projects. Translate also uses Pootle to assist a number of, mostly African, languages to localise Mozilla Firefox & Firefox Mobile and the mozilla.com website. From Afrikaans to Zulu, Akan to Swahili and Welsh to Urdu, Scots Gaelic to Sakha ... Pootle is helping bring Firefox to a number of new users.

With Pootle being a critical part of Mozilla's localisation infrastructure Mozilla has engaged with Translate to make Pootle better. At Translate we're really excited about this as this allows us to address some critical issues that impact the Mozilla community when using Pootle. And with Pootle being Free software it also allows us to address issues that impact the wider Pootle user community.

We're following the bugs tagged as "better verbatim" and those in the Verbatim component as our core deliverable for Mozilla.

Some highlights of what you can expect include:

• Cleaner nicer UI - you can get an feel for the new UI at our beta site: front page, translation
• Better VC integration - Pootle was one of the first online translation tools to integrate with version control. But we want to do it better.
• Translation Memory (TM) - Pootle will link with Amagama, Translate's TM server, to return translation matches from all FOSS projects. (Some rather unsexy JSON results for the Afrikaans translation of Computer
• And much, much, more...

If you have some issues that are niggling you while using Verbatim, or other Pootle instances, then please report bugs so that they can be reviewed and prioritised (we can't make any promises but at least they will be on our radar).

If you don't want to watch on the sidelines but want to get your hands dirty then check our the code on github. Pootle is written in Python and Django and there are a number of EasyHacks for everyone, even non-coders. So pop into #pootle or our development list and shout if you want to give us a hand.

Firefox: Venda, Herero and Ndonga comming soon

We're continuing to translate Firefox on Pootle. Just added are Venda, Ndonga (a dialect of Owambo) and Heroro.

This takes us up to 17 African languages being localised on Pootle. The levels of activity vary from super active to still gotta get off the ground. Seven are released in Firefox, three are waiting review (Wolof, Fulah and Acoli).

Apart from the African languages we're also supporting: Urdu, Sakha and Scots Gaelic. In fact we'll support any world language that needs a little help to overcome the technical hurdles of localising Firefox.

To make things easier for new teams we added documentation to the Mozilla wiki about localising Firefox on Pootle.