Michal Čihař - Archive for 7/2013

Weblate 1.6 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements, especially adds voting for suggestions, improves import performance and brings more helpful admin interface. This is also first release with crowdfunded feature, but there are still some features to fund!

Full list of changes for 1.6:

• Nicer error handling on registration.
• Browsing of changes.
• Fixed sorting of machine translation suggestions.
• Improved support for MyMemory machine translation.
• Added support for Amagama machine translation.
• Various optimizations on frequently used pages.
• Highlights searched phrase in search results.
• Support for automatic fixups while saving the message.
• Tracking of translation history and option to revert it.
• Added support for Google Translate API.
• Added support for managing SSH host keys.
• Various form validation improvements.
• Various quality checks improvements.
• Performance improvements for import.
• Added support for voting on suggestions.
• Cleanup of admin interface.

You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Ready to run appliances will be soon available in SUSE Studio Gallery.

Weblate is also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others.

If you are free software project which would like to use Weblate, I'm happy to help you with set up or even host Weblate for you.

Yesterday, I've spent some time trying to improve speed of translation import in Weblate. It got annoyingly slow while adding new features and I felt there has to be some area for improvements even with all the features.

I was testing on development server with debug stuff enabled (what slows down things quite a lot already) and first import took about 30 seconds.

Quick look revealed that for linked repositories, the link lookup happens too often, so some caching could be used. This has saved about 3 seconds...

With offloaded indexing (what is anyway only useful setup for production use), every reindex request was checking whether there is already one before creating new one. In most cases there is none before, so it's simply faster to try to create one and ignore error in case it is already there. We're now 5 seconds faster.

Another big resource consumer are quality checks. They provide useful feedback to translators, but it means that quite a lot of code needs to be executed for every single string. First thing I've realized is that unit check state is recalculated everytime regardless the fact whether there was any change, what was easy to fix. The other speed issue is in consistency check - it does too complex SQL query, which usually does not match anything. Converting this to much simpler one (which will in most cases still have no results) improves performance for usual path while having minimal impact for the real checking. Another 4 seconds down on my test import.

Last thing which I changed is way how per translation statistics are updated. In past this required quite a lot of queries, but yesterday I've realized this can be much reduced. During test suite run on PostgreSQL, I saw that it's not that easy - PostgreSQL does not allow to sum boolean fields, but fortunately this can be fixed as well. This has saved about 2 seconds.

In the end the tested import took 16 seconds instead of original 30 and issued 2500 SQL queries instead of 5000 at the beginning. I hope you will enjoy regained speed of imports :-).

The first crowdfunded feature for Weblate is here - Voting for suggestions.

Once you enable this for your translation, you can vote for translation suggestions and once they reach defined number of votes, it will get accepted. You can however combine this with other Weblate features to achieve different setups, see our documentation for some other use cases.

This is also most likely last feature for Weblate 1.6, so you can expect release in next week or two in case no major problems appear.

PS: There are still some features to fund.

For quite some time, I maintain set of few scripts to generate dictionaries for StarDict. The generated dictionaries are quite popular, but the scripts become quite horrible over the time.

Now I finally found time to cleanup and refactoring, so that they share as much code as possible. As the duplication was quite massive, I was able to reduce code size to 60%, while adding new features and doing better error handling. Also now it should be pretty easy to add support for additional resources, so contributions are welcome :-).

The code can be found on GitHub.