ertza

Although there’s nothing tracked on this blog, Summer of Code officially started on May 26th (see the timeline), and it’s almost a month since then.

For those who aren’t on the loop, I’m working on adding and improving some Pootle functionalities, mentored by Sayamindu Dasgupta. Pootle is a web-based translation software built on top of the Translate Toolkit.

Obviously there have been things happening, and I’ll try to summarize in this post the main development that has been done.

For the impatient: you can checkout my project dashboard to have an overview of what’s going on.

What’s been keeping me busy?

First of all, university. I think the big majority of students taking part on SoC have been (or unfortunately, are) very busy finishing their latest university exams and projects. That’s quite a bit of time, and usually it takes longer than expected.

But well, at my spare time I’ve managed to setup my development environment (this probably deserves an entire post ;) and start working on giving support for an alternative source language. This feature is very useful for those translators who know other languages better than English. Also, it provides a way to disambiguate the context of the translation unit by looking at what other languages have used.

I’ve based my work on a previous patch submitted by my mentor, and that has been a fantastic entry point for me, since I’ve been playing around something that more or less worked.

The feature has been extended in order to let users choose the preferred alternative language; this is a must have. Also, due to possible performance problems in big Pootle installations, an option to disable entirely the feature server-wide has been added.

Note that in order to use this feature for a specific project, there must exist the selected alternative source language in the project and the files must be translated, of course. The translation units that aren’t translated on the alternative language project won’t be displayed — there’s nothing to show.

There are some pending issues that should be addressed, though, for example giving support for plural forms. Anyhow, the feature has already been included in trunk and if there aren’t major issues it will probably be released within the next Pootle version (1.2).

As there’s a Pootle server running the latest trunk code at http://beta.locamotion.org you can test there the new feature. This server also has more improvements that you probably won’t notice, including the newly merged indexing branch which would speed up searches.

To learn more about this feature, please refer to the documentation.

What’s next?

Now I’ve started working on making it possible to view translation suggestions while translating. At the moment viewing suggestions is bound to the View Suggestions option which only displays the suggestions along with the current translation, but it’s not possible to edit translations at the same time.

I already have advanced some work on this, but there should be more incoming on the next few days. Stay tunned.