Friedel en ander frappanthede

We released the first release candidate of Virtaal yesterday to the public. See the announcement on the mailing list. "Virtaal" is an Afrikaans play on words meaning "for language", but also refers to translation. I take responsibility for coming up with the name.

The Translate project has been working for years on good programs to help with localisation and localisation management. Virtaal is a natural extension of this work, and builds on top of the existing work that we have done so far.

Some features already present in this version:

• Support for many localisation file formats: Gettext (.po and .mo), XLIFF (.xlf), TMX (.tmx), TBX (.tbx), WordFast TM (.txt), Qt linguist (.ts), Qt Phrase Book (.qph)
• Simple layout with fast and easy navigation in the file
• Displays comments from programmers and previous translators
• Displays context (like msgctxt in PO)
• Autocorrect and autocomplete (users of OpenOffice.org should feel right at home)
• Copying original string to target string taking your language's punctuation rules into account. A "quotation" automatically becomes a « quotation » in French, without the translator having to first quickly fix the punctuation to the French style.
• Spell checker for source and target text

There is still a lot on the way, but for now we want to encourage everybody to join us to help test and improve on this first version that will be released shortly.