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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.

Firefox localisation in Uganda

There has been quite some activity in Uganda with regard to localising Firefox.

The Lugandan teams had a Firefox launch last week (29 September 2011). I sent them a video congratulating them on their work.

The same team is behind Acholi which went from zero to hero is little over 4 weeks. Following the Lugandan launch we've been joined by people translating Lusoga. A great day for the languages of Uganda.

Bringing more languages to Firefox via Pootle

With the addition of Lusoga we're now translating 13 Firefox languages on Pootle. Some of these are official Firefox translations and some are yet to move out of Aurora into the normal Mozilla process. We started with 4 a little over a year ago, so a growth to 13 is really encouraging.

The languages hosted on Pootle were initially only African but now we have included non-African languages, Urdu and Sakha. We now accept anyone who wishes to translate Firefox into their language.

If your language isn't covered by Firefox and you need some help and assistance in getting up to speed then this community can help you.

Localizing Mac OS X strings files using open source PO editors

Do you hve a nice shiny Mac or iPhone app that you want to translate? Now you can easily manage the localisation of Mac OS X .strings files with translators using common open source PO editing tools.

I'll post a little later about using Pootle to allow you to do web-based community localisation of the same strings files.

Firefox Home become the motivator

I've really wanted to write this for a while, in fact a bug has been lurking about this very issue for some time now. But it was the release of Mozilla's Firefox Home for the iPhone that really got me going.

I just knew that we could make it easy to localise not just Firefox Home but any iPhone app.

But why don't you just use a text editor?

Good question. Why not just use a text editor? Well you can do that. But as I always like to say you wouldn't ask a vim user to use Emacs now would you? Or a better example, you wouldn't swap your favourite IDE for Notepad. Of course you wouldn't. So why do you ask a translator to swap their high performance translation tool for a beat up old text editor? Do you hate translators that much that you'd inflict on them something that you'd never do to yourself?

There are good strings files editors why not use those? Two reasons. Firstly, we want translators to use the tools that they are familiar with and in the case of open source localisation it's most likely an open source PO editing tool. Secondly, for web translation we want to be able to do a few things the strings files just can't do which we get when we convert the file to PO.

What are the benefits of converting to PO

1. We hide the encoding, users don't need to worry about getting the file into UTF-16
2. We manage escaping, we hide that from the user and they don't need to learn anything about .strings escaping
3. The output strings files look like the input, we preserve layout and comments so you can get cleaner diffs with the original
4. We don't break files, if we do its a bug. For a programmer this is great as you are almost certain that the files you have won't break a build. You could even pull in the latest translations and be confident that they aren't broken
5. Partial translations can be used in your application while testing
6. Translators get to use their familiar PO editing: Virtaal, Poedit or Lokalize
7. You are able to do community based web localisation using Pootle

What are strings files

Strings files are simple key value files that look like this:

/* Comment */
"key" = "value";

"Save As..." = "Stoor as...";

What is the translation process now with PO files?

First we convert .strings to PO files.

Note: prop2po strings support is not in a released version of the Translate Toolkit. But you can use these instruction to run from a checkout.

prop2po -P English.strings English.string.pot

Send English.strings.pot to all of your translations. They can rename this to their language e.g. German.strings.po and begin translating in any PO editing tool.

Converting back is just as simple.

po2prop -t English.strings German.strings.po German.strings

You now have a German.strings file that can be used in your application. An added benefit is that even if the German is only 50% translated we can still convert back for testing. If you haven't translated something then we'll just insert the English into German.strings.

When you update the English.strings it's a simple matter of sending your translators the new POT files and they can update their old PO files using their PO editor. Compare that to anyone using strings files in an editor who would need to perform a diff and manually check for changes, why do that if you can simply get the translator to update the file and let their PO tool show them what needs translating.

You can hide translators from the po2prop and prop2po step making it a very simple matter of publishing a POT file for translators to keep up-to-date.

However, we can make it even easier by using a web based translation tool like Pootle. In this case the translators don't even need to do the updating, you can do that for them.

As I said I'll be making another blog post about setting up a strings project on Pootle.

What's new in Virtaal 0.6.1

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."
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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.