On Friday, February 22, we hosted a Birds of a Feather conversation about localization tools.  I had blogged a bit about the event leading up to the day and was very please to see that we had over 20 people show up to the meeting.

The format was pretty simple.  I introduced the team and what we have created to evaluate the any proposals we receive from community members who want to develop a localization tool and might need some support.  Those can be found in a prior blog post by me titled, “Evaluating l10n tools proposals”.

I then turned the floor over to five different contributors who presented what they have been working on.  Their presentations were actual demos of the software with interactive Q&A sessions.  A lot of great questions came up about file import and export, client vs. web-based translation, translation management software and more.

My computer was being used for a few presentations, so I wasn’t able to take copius notes, but I asked each person to send me a few lines about their project so that it can be represented here in their words most accurately.  Here are summaries from four of the five people who presented.

Alexandru Szasz, The Narro Project

“Narro really lowers the entry barrier to the software translation world by using a simple, intuitive interface and extensive checking to ensure that translation quality is kept high and people learn by translating, not by reading guidelines. I like to call it open translation because anyone can contribute, anyone can make better suggestions anytime and from anywhere. Translation maintainers benefit as well by pushing the changes to the versioning system or the other way around simply by pushing a button or executing a command.”

Friedel Wolff, Translate Toolkit

“The Translate Toolkit allows conversion of many file formats, (including the Mozilla l10n files) to standard translation formats allowing the use of many translation and translation management tools. Through the Translate Toolkit, Pootle allows web based management, dissemination, quality evaluation and web based translation, while still allowing offline translation. These tools try to simplify things, while providing ways of improving quality, even while more inexperienced translators are more easily able to join. These tools already form part of the localisation process for many teams and projects inside and outside the Mozilla community.”

Adrian Kalla

“My tool takes a completely new way to translate Mozilla based software like SeaMonkey, Thunderbird or Firefox itself. Thanks to its easy way of doing translation work by simply editing only a few text files with a Unicode text editor, this tool targets translators who wants to translate one or more of the toolkit-based applications in a short period of time. The tool can also do automatically: import an existing localization, incorporate new or changed text strings from Mozilla CVS or from a language pack, replace them in the local files temporarily by the original strings, import already translated strings from one application to an another (for example from Thunderbird to SeaMonkey) or compare the translated strings of two applications, commit changed or new strings back to CVS, make locally localized language packs and binary releases. (Some of the features to be implemented soon.)”

Jeroen Vermeulen, Launchpad Translations Project

• Online translation, but imports and exports allow offline editing using other toolsets.  Online translation in particular requires no technical skills beyond such fundamentals as not translating variable names.
• Supports large projects (including Ubuntu, which is pretty large): separate translators and reviewers, assign teams to languages.
• Offers suggestions: alternative translations suggested by others, translation for same message identifier used elsewhere (effectively a shared dictionary), translations for same message id used in a third language.
• With Mozilla’s translation style, since the English text is not used to identify messages, you can change the English text without upsetting translations to other languages.

Launchpad project still lacking:

• Integration with code repository: doesn’t commit to your CVS.
• Exporting to XPI format.  We’re working on it.
• Not open source yet.

Zbigniew Braniecki, IRC: Gandalf, from the Aviary.pl team also presented, but hasn’t been able to send me his description yet.  I am sure he’ll comment on this post.

The next steps for moving forward:  We need to gain consensus on what is the best way (if there is one) to support these projects.  In some cases, it could be in the form of a financial grant to help further development.  In other cases, it might be hardware resources to help scale the project.  Or, it might be making simple connections between different people in the community.  What people should understand is that there is no “one project” that we will support.  We’d like to help those projects that make sense for the Mozilla community.  I intend to push forward on ways we can help, working with each of these individuals.  Finally, if you attended the BoF, please send us your remarks.

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