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.

The interesting/worrying thing is that most of the fields could identify uniquely me on their own. Nobody else uses the same language combination for HTTP's Accept-Lang (the list of languages that I prefer). Nobody else uses the same version of Firefox in Afrikaans on my Linux distribution.

I won't go into why this is good or bad, but it is interesting to know that if I had reason to not want to be identified, I can't use Firefox in Afrikaans any more, and I can't indicate my preferred language to web sites. I realise that plugins can probably improve the matter, but if this is seen as a danger, it is probably a danger for more people than the number of people who would know about NoScript or TorButton.

Should we perhaps think afresh about how much information is sent by web browsers? At least I now feel a little bit more special...

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.

Pootle makes it possible to configure permissions that determines who is allowed to do which tasks in a certain language. There are settings that apply to the whole server, and the language team's settings can be further customised for a specific project where necessary, but the most powerful configuration is probably where most things are configured on the language level. It is easy to configure that some people may only make suggestions, while others are allowed to edit translations directly.

The pages with news can help a team to stay up to date with all the activities. Team leaders can simply write news that will also be available in the RSS feed, but Pootle will also contribute by generating notices that informs users about files that were uploaded, new projects, when a file reaches 100% status, etc.

Furthermore Pootle helps with terminology by showing suggestions from a terminology project during translation. This helps with consistency, especially if newcomers are contributing. There is also a big selection of quality checks available that helps to find a variety of problems.

But Pootle tries to not impose any restrictions on a team. People who want to translate offline can easily download files and complete their work with something like Virtaal - even without an internet connection. After files are uploaded, all the other functions can still be used. Team members can even work directly with version control, and Pootle can then integrate with such a version control system.

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).

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

• ANLoc, funded by IDRC
• Mozilla Corporation

Thank you to everyone involved!

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

• A new user interface
  • more useful information
  • a pretty new design
  • easier customisation of the Pootle design
  • improvements to alternative source languages
  • news feeds on several levels of Pootle
  • automatic notices for certain events on Pootle
  • better account and password management
• Easier management from the web interface
  • uploading template files
  • removing files
  • scanning the file system for translation files
  • removing languages from a project
  • the possibility to upload all translations as suggestions
  • server permissions
  • language permissions
  • delegation of administration rights (per language and server wide)
  • language administrators can manage all aspects of their language
• Better performance
  • many pages are served from cache for anonymous users
  • support for more concurrent users
  • support for larger deployments
  • faster uploads
• Easier deployment
  • can run from a checkout / extracted archive without installing
  • interface translations from the Pootle project or .mo files
  • performance tips on the admin page
  • creating initial database content if needed
• Back-end improvements
  • built on Django
  • can now use many database systems, including MySQL
  • can run standalone or under Apache
  • can use memcached
  • LDAP support
  • migration script for older Pootle versions

Older Pootle 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 level are now supported. Goals and assignments will receive attention in a future release. Read more about migrating from older versions, or contact us on the mailing list if you have any questions.

This release will also benefit from improvements made to the Translate Toolkit since the last Pootle release, such as speed improvements, better XLIFF support, and better quality checks.

Yesterday the Translate team released version 0.5.0 of Virtaal. Virtaal is a translation program with powerful features to help translators increase translation quality and have fun. It is available for download from SourceForge and soon your favourite Linux distro.

This release was meant to only add a few small features, but ended up with many other enhancements and nice bugfixes.

• Autoterm provides terminology files for Virtaal to download and use (even if the internet connection disappears later)
• Web look-up allows you to look-up some selected text on websites
• Highlighting of differences in non-100% TM matches
• New plugins for machine translation with Google and Moses
• Correctly support Open-Tran.eu for languages with regional modifiers
• Web requests now accept compressed responses if the server offers it
• Language identification for easier selection of language pairs
• New autocorrect files for Luxembourgish and Croatian
• Updated translations as well as these new ones: Sotho, Northern Sotho, Songhay, Korean, Ukrainian. Contact us to add yours!
• Several bug fixes

Users of input methods such as ibus should see their issues fixed, but need GTK+ 2.18 (on Linux). Many thanks to Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay, Peng Huang, and Matthias Clasen for helping to resolve these issues. (bugs 1119, 1281)
This release will also benefit from some improvements in new releases of the Translate Toolkit, including support for OmegaT glossary files, and the experimental new PO parser which is much faster.

The Virtaal user manual is an excellent way to learn how Virtaal can help you to be productive.

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.

The Translate project has been working very hard on the upcoming release of Pootle for the last year, and things are looking great for the upcoming release. We recently released beta-4, and things are getting close to release quality. Kudos to Alaa and Wynand who did most of the work. We also had contributions from several other companies and individuals. There are loads of improvements since version 1.2, but I wanted to write specifically about some improvements to the user interface that translators and localisation managers will enjoy.

Yes, the rumour is true: we got rid of the Pootle mascot (known to some as the potato man). He served us loyally for a few years, but we are happy to see him go as we say goodbye to the days of the old Pootle.

In fact, there is a completely new look. Have a sneak peak on our testing server. Many people have worked on making this happen, including people from Mozilla, Manal Hassan and Julen Ruiz Aizpuru. In fact, Julen has now become the most active contributor to our user interface. I think it looks much more modern and pretty, and presents a lot of functionality much better.

The front page now has much more information. It actually gives a complete overview of things happening on the server. This idea came from the contributors at Mozilla. It also provides a summary of the top contributors on the server, and similar summaries are displayed on several sub-pages of the server.

Administrators will find far more of the configuration options in the web interface. Previously some options could only be found in the configuration files. It will also be easier to find some of the admin pages from the projects that they relate to.

A feature that I'm very excited about, is a better organisation of the activities in the project view. Pootle's quality checks are loved by all its users, but it has been a bit hidden. Things are now separated into divisions that will make more sense for the users.

All of this promises a very exciting release of Pootle. Join us now in the final stretch to make it happen.

I noticed recently that Wikipedia in Swahili has more articles than Wikipedia in Afrikaans. The difference is already around 9%. I hope and believe that most people know that the article count at Wikipedia doesn't say everything about the relevant encyclopaedia, but it remains an interesting toy, and it is interesting to see how things develop among the African languages.

I have been keeping an eye on the Wikipedia project for some time. It remains a wonderful demonstration of the power of a strong community. It is also a way for a number of minority languages to create a useful web resource, and for many languages, perhaps even their first encyclopaedia. The Afrikaans version of Wikipedia was the largest in terms of article count for a long while, but now Swahili is ahead. It must have happened in the last few months. Congratulations to all the contributors to the Swahili version!

Tables with interesting summaries of the statistics are available for Afrikaans and Swahili. (You might want to compare with the English version to understand the table.) Of course it is important to note that the two languages differ quite a bit in other aspects of growth and size. Another interesting page for the purpose of comparison is the list of all Wikipedias. More detail about article sizes is also available for Afrikaans and Swahili. If I look at this, I would like to believe that the Afrikaans Wikipedia still has an edge in a few areas, especially in terms of article size and shear amount of text. However, it does seem as if the Afrikaans version's growth isn't really accelerating.

Luckily this is not a competition with losers, and I'm very happy for good progress in any African language.

I have recently created an Ubuntu PPA to make the Translate.org.za software more accessible. At the moment only the Translate Toolkit and Virtaal is packaged, with Pootle to follow soon.

Please let me know if there are any questions, problems or comments.