Friedel en ander frappanthede

We're having a translation event at Translate.org.za for Zulu speakers to learn more about software localisation. Join the Translate.org.za team for a fun filled day of translation, training, discussion and eating. Be part of advancing the support of Zulu in software.

We will be showing you how to use some of our translation tools, discuss some of the issues found when translating software and feed you a light lunch, all for free. You will be providing your language, discussion, a sense of fun and the willingness to learn, share and translate.

I recently had to do a slightly harder bit of translation work for Pidgin. Part of it was an extension for the XMPP protocol to standardise emotions. With this extension different chat programs can exchange information about the user's mood in a standard way. But the text shown to the user should of course be translated, and this ended up not being easy at all.

I've been convinced by a few friends to organise an event to bring together a few people to translate a bit. Dwayne is kind enough to offer the Translate.org.za offices for the occasion.

Read the full blog post (in Afrikaans)

I've been interested in accessibility for some time and I believe that there are several areas of intersection between accessibility and localisation. For example: what does a translated program help if there isn't a screen reader in the particular language? The recent posts about accessibility on the GNOME planet probably inspired me to improve things in Virtaal.

My colleague Dwayne just wrote an interesting piece about the use of continuous integration for testing our product translations. Now I want to start thinking about how we can extend it with pofilter.

I just realised I didn't yet blog about the release of Virtaal 0.6.0. Virtaal is an advanced program with features to help translators increase translation quality and have fun.

Although this was initially intended as a bug fix release, there were several extra improvements, and we intended to indicate it with the version number as well. I'm really happy about how the quality improved over the last while in several areas.

I've been working on improving the accessibility of Virtaal, and was interested to see that almost all high contrast inverse icons on my system are part of GNOME themes. In other words, almost no application outside of the official GNOME desktop set seems to have a high contrast inverse icon. How is an external application supposed to do this?

I was recently testing some things in a virtual machine on the upcoming Ubuntu version (10.04 - Lucid, I think). I had a look at some of my translations, and was surprised to see that some translations I submitted for GNOME 2.30 were not available yet, even though GNOME 2.30 was already upgraded. Probably the language packs sync at a different schedule. More surprising however, was the content of the "Translated by" tab in the About dialogue.

After my visit to Limerick Solomon and myself have a copy for proofreading available of the localisation guide for Amharic. It is meant as a way to help speakers of Amharic to better understand and handle some of the issues specifically arising in Amharic localisation. We hope it will help translators to start their work in software localisation.

As part of my visit to the Centre for Next Generation Localisation I talked today to a group about ANLoc and about the software for localisation that we develop at Translate.org.za. It's been a long while since I had a group of people listening that attentively to me for more than two hours.