Friedel en ander frappanthede

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.