As you probably know, my project aimed to improve Pootle’s user experience by adding new functionalities and improving existing ones.

Things already done

• Support for an alternative source language. With this new feature translators who know another language better than English will be able to translate using that language. Thus, new contributors can take part in the translation process. Also, this opens a way to disambiguate words with vague meaning or to help guessing the context.
  
  Pootle displaying an alternative source language.
• Viewing suggestions while translating. Up to Pootle 1.1, in order to see suggestions made by others it was necessary to select the View Suggestions option within the editing functions. Now this is straightforward, as suggestions are shown just below the current translation unit. Therefore, translators are aware of the suggestions others have done and they don’t make the mistake of suggesting something that’s already suggested.
  Also, users with reviewing privileges will be able to accept and reject suggestions directly without reloading the entire page.
  
  Viewing suggestions while translating.
• Searching for fields. Although Pootle has the ability to search using pogrep or an indexing engine such as Xapian, its interface only made it possible to perform simple searches. We made a list of the possibilities each method offer, and decided to put a goal to start improving this function: giving the ability to search for fields. So now it’s possible to select in which field we want to search, including source, target, location, and comments.
• Automatically unfuzzying messages marked as fuzzy. This is one of those things you don’t expect to do but end up doing it. Although it wasn’t in my original proposal, Dwayne, jealous with the work done with jQuery, posted an idea on the translate-pootle mailing list, so I took that bug and worked on that for a while. Now, an entry marked as fuzzy will be automatically unchecked when a change is made to the text.
• Similar to the previous task, I ended contributing a small patch to restyle the text showing the current running checks.
• Documentation for the described features has been done/updated too: alternative source language, suggestions, and searching for fields.

All these functionalities are already committed into SVN trunk and will be part of the upcoming Pootle 1.2 release. Anyway, now we’re testing this new stuff and some bug fixing is required before we can release a stable version.

Finally, I would like to point out another task I’ve been working on:

• Integrate open-tran. This isn’t finished yet, but I have a working prototype that shows suggestions retrieved from open-tran.eu using the XML-RPC interface. Some rework needs to be done on the code-base but I hope to finish it soon.

Things left to do or not started

It’s not easy estimating how much things you’ll be able to do in a three months time-frame, and this task becomes more difficult when you don’t know which code you’ll have to deal with. This leads to a couple of tasks dropped from the original proposal:

• Merging from templates. The idea was giving project administrators an easy way to upload templates without getting onto the server.
• RSS feeds. Communication is far from ideal in Pootle, and it’s very important to keep translators up-to-date in what refers to new/updated translations. With the work on the mozootle branch, Pootle will add support for databases so perhaps this makes it easier to open new communication ways.

Also, as far as time permits, I’m planning to continue developing for Pootle, and there are some areas where it’s necessary to focus in order to refine the work done until the moment:

• Performing AJAX requests efficiently. This affects specially to suggestions, since the code in trunk sends data to the general-purpose translatepage (inefficiently), and ideally a single script should handle that and return a response in XML or JSON format.
• Handle correctly paste events before we go unfuzzy. As each browser has its implementation for events, it’s very tricky being able to handle them all. Therefore, another approach should be taken in this aspect to avoid these issues.
• Expand alternative source language support. By now this feature works only on plain units, i.e., doesn’t support plural forms. Also, optimizations to gain performance should be taken into account.

All is not about coding

But Summer of Code is not just coding, it’s also about learning new things, personal experiences, and knowing new people. Some random bits about this:

• git-svn. I didn’t know I could use git and svn both at the same time. The main code is held at the SourceForge SVN repository, and with git-svn it’s been very easy to make feature branches to work on. It took me some time getting used to it, but it’s worthwhile.
• Dynamic web development is not just PHP.
• I love jQuery. JavaScript made simple.
• Have you ever been in a situation where you hate all the browsers? Oh yeah, rendering issues suck, it’s better not knowing how much time I’ve spent trying to resolve those kind of conflicts.
• dir=rtl should display items as if they were reflected on a mirror.
• Community support is the key in FLOSS. Although I had background on other FLOSS projects, SoC experience has introduced me deeply into this world. It’s been very important the community support in order to get feedback, testing, a thank you note or even have a chat.
• Communication in English is another good point for this SoC — I’m not from an English-speaking zone. This blog is one of the side-effects for that need of communication, along with IRC meetings and weekly reports.
• It’s been a great pleasure having the chance to know the people you’re working with face-to-face and discussing project-related things around a table or having a drink.

Thank you notes

This project wouldn’t be possible without people that have been supporting my work for a while, so with these humble lines I’d like to say thank you (in no particular order): Translate.org.za staff (I’ve felt like at home with you), Friedel Wolff (hey man, you have time for everything!), Dwayne Bailey (thanks for your ideas and general support), Wynand Winterbach (you’re the git master! thanks for all), my mentor Sayamindu Dasgupta (you’ve done more than you could think, specially at the beginning), Lars Kruse (fundamental for the search stuff), all the people at #pootle and translate-devel and translate-pootle mailing lists, for your help, comments, and appreciations, and Google for making these things happen.

Wynand has shown me his orange-belt-git-man abilities and in a few minutes we’ve managed to get all the stuff working again. I’m going to list the command we’ve used just for the record.

1. First, we create a file containing all our refs list, .git/packed-refs:

   $ git-gc

2. Before making any change to our repository, we make a backup. After that, we can run git-filter-branch, a tool that lets rewrite the git revision history by rewriting the branches. Wynand provided a one-liner that does the job:

   $ git-filter-branch --msg-filter 'sed "s/git-svn-id: http/git-svn-id: https/g"' $(cat .git/packed-refs | awk '/[a-fA-F0-9]*/ {print $2}' | grep -v 'pack-refs')

   Which replaces the occurrences of http with https for each reference listed under .git/packed-refs. We should see something like this in the progress:

   Rewrite 05f17b2a31e82fc1354d3865ae9adcaef3a7ca5e (3374/3415)

3. Then, we need to fix our repository configuration stored in .git/config:

   $ vi .git/config
   :s/http/https
   :wq

4. Now, the first step to see whether it works:

   $ git-svn rebase

   Perhaps we get an error regarding SVN:

   Unable to determine upstream SVN information from working tree history

   In that case,

   rm -rf .git/svn/

   does the trick.

Note that probably we need to pass the -f flag to git-push the first time we’re pushing after this change.
Now we can keep on working with git and SVN! Thank you Wynand!

Update: we’ve setup the beta Pootle server at beta.locamotion.org with the new suggestions interface so it’s easier for you to check out this new feature.

Therefore, aiming to avoid duplicated work that can cause not seeing what others have suggested before, I’m working on enabling suggestions while translating. The user now sees the suggestions just below the translation text area. Users with reviewing privileges are able to accept and discard suggestions from the same interface, and that’s actually the part where I’ve been thinking of something different. Here comes the AJAX part.

To keep things easy and not reinventing the wheel, I’ve used jQuery, just as the guys working at mozootle have done ;) jQuery is a JavaScript library focused on keeping simplicity for developers at the same time of being fast and powerful. For instance, creating an HTTP POST request using the famous XMLHttpRequest object is as easy as writing $.post("myscriptname", {param1: "value1"});

Coming back to our context, if the user has reviewing privileges, the interface will show two additional buttons (images) to accept or reject the suggestion. I’ve used the tangoished GTK+ stock icons (resizing them from 20×20 to 16×16), although I could use famfamfam silk icons too; both are great.
When the user selects an option, jQuery starts its action: first, retrieves the necessary parameters and creates a serialized string, then it makes an AJAX request and finally if all goes fine the suggestion is added or removed.

Accepting/rejecting suggestions works in an AJAX-fashion. Click to enlarge.

To give this a cool aspect, I’ve used an effect similar to the WordPress Comments Management. As of today, this is implemented only for the reject option, because accepting a suggestion should suppose more things than simply accepting that one: it should reject all the remaining suggestions and display things accordingly.

I think this feature will be more or less finished by this week, so keep an eye on bug 427 for patches.

Update: I’ve made a little screencast to show you how this works.

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.

Welcome.

Oh, and probably you’re wondering what the hell ertza is; ertza means edge in Basque.