Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Weblate

As Weblate 1.3 is out, it's time to think about features for next release. My current plan is to go more into two areas.

First is improving support for machine translations. I have some ideas how to integrate these in interesting ways, I just hope my (poor) Javascript knowledge will not prevent me doing it that way.

The second area is improving testsuite. Right now it really does not cover much and I'd like to cover at least basic functionality with different file formats. I'll see how much I will be able to cover, but at least I will try to cover as much as possible :-).

Quite on updated schedule (ie. one month later than originally planned), Weblate 1.3 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements, especially in support of non gettext files, new quality checks and improved performance.

Full list of changes for 1.3:

• Compatibility with PostgreSQL database backend.
• Removes languages removed in upstream git repository.
• Improved consistency checks processing.
• Added new checks (BB code, XML markup and newlines).
• Support for optional rebasing instead of merge.
• Possibility to relocate Weblate (eg. to run it under /weblate path).
• Support for manually choosing file type in case autodetection fails.
• Better support for Android resources.
• Support for generating SSH key from web interface.
• More visible data exports.
• New buttons to enter some special characters.
• Support for exporting dictionary.
• Support for locking down whole Weblate installation.
• Checks for source strings and support for source strings review.
• Support for user comments for both translations and source strings.
• Better changes log tracking.
• Changes can now be monitored using RSS.
• Improved support for RTL languages.

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 (this will be decided case by case as my hosting space is limited).

Weblate is close to 1.3 release (should happen on Friday if nothing urgent appears) and it's quite last chance for translators to catch up.

Weblate is of course translated using Weblate, but you can of course also translate Gettext po files directly and either upload them into Weblate or use Github issue tracker for that.

If you don't know Weblate yet, it is web based tool for translating with Git integration. You can also call it crowdsourcing platform if you wish :-).

While working on tool for online translating, I should have probably expected this, but somehow it surprised me - Weblate should support RTL languages.

This issue was brought to me today by Yaron Shahrabani (Hebrew translator of Wine) and I simply had to look at this quite unexplored area for me. Fortunately it seems to be pretty easy, just matter of adding few html attributes to right places.

I've quickly adjusted the code (the hardest thing was to get list of RTL languages) and Weblate should now properly support RTL languages on both sides - as an user interface language and as a translated language.

In case you understand any of Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Urdu or other RTL language, I'd really like to hear from you if Weblate shows them correctly.

Yesterday I've completed last big feature I wanted to have for Weblate 1.3 - improved changes tracking and exporting this as RSS feed.

You can find example of this feature on data exports page on demo server, it is also covered in the documentation. I think there is not much to describe here, these are simple RSS feeds which will contain all important things happening to translation.

This being last major feature, we're now aiming at stabilization and bug fixes. I expect this phase will take two weeks where I plan to deploy new version to http://l10n.cihar.com/ (probably next week).

If you can help with testing, you're welcome to help and report bugs.

Weblate 1.3 will bring several new features. One of recently implemented parts is source strings review.

Translators quite often find some problems with original string. Be it typo, wrong wording or simply the message is hard to understand. In Weblate 1.3 they will have an option to push feedback to developers. The feedback is stored within Weblate and optionally can be sent to configured email.

In addition to this, there are now checks for source strings as well, which might help you to improve quality of them. New checks are of course covered in the documentation.

You can already try current Weblate on http://demo.weblate.org/, though there are still some things which need polishing.

As the openSUSE Conference and all related events are over, it's time to share my thoughts how it was.

This was actually first conference ever where I helped with organizing, so it was quite new experience for me. Week before it has happened I expected quite a lot of problems, but in the end everything went more or less smoothly.

Having something like 700-800 visitors is IMHO great for first year of LinuxDays, even though it has been collocated with other conferences. Most people came on Saturday and there were less of them on Sunday. Maybe it was result of the party, which lasted for many of them till early morning (I've left around 1 AM and there were still lot of people drinking).

Besides organizing stuff, I also had my own talk about Weblate. Unfortunately not much people has attended it, but those who did gave me some valuable feedback which will be reflected in next Weblate release. Anyway if you want to see my slides from this talk, they are now available on my website.

Quite on schedule, Weblate 1.2 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements, especially for project admins, handling of po files and improved performance.

Full list of changes for 1.2:

• Weblate now uses South for database migration, please check upgrade instructions if you are upgrading.
• Fixed minor issues with linked git repos.
• New introduction page for engaging people with translating using Weblate.
• Added widgets which can be used for promoting translation projects.
• Added option to reset repository to origin (for privileged users).
• Project or subproject can now be locked for translations.
• Possibility to disable some translations.
• Configurable options for adding new translations.
• Configuration of git commits per project.
• Simple antispam protection.
• Better layout of main page.
• Support for automatically pushing changes on every commit.
• Support for email notifications of translators.
• List only used languages in preferences.
• Improved handling of not known languages when importing project.
• Support for locking translation by translator.
• Optionally maintain Language-Team header in po file.
• Include some statistics in about page.
• Supports (and requires) django-registration 0.8.
• Caching of counted units with failing checks.
• Checking of requirements during setup.
• Documentation improvements.

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 can be found 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 (this will be decided case by case as my hosting space is limited).

Update: Weblate appliace has been updated to 1.2 as well.

About month ago, I wrote that there were over 20000 translations done using Weblate in three months. It looks like I was too pessimistic with future as in slightly more than month l10n.cihar.com has reached 30000 translations.

This is quite great achievement and shows big user base. Especially together with rising number of third-party installations of Weblate (still some of the big ones do not want to be mentioned).

On the other side, there have already been around 100 issues open, out of which most were fixed (1.2 release already includes 30 fixed issues). Still I'm sure there is lot of place for improvements :-).

Anyway if you are looking for more numbers, you can find them on Ohloh :-).

More and more people seem to be interested in Weblate and it is becoming less and less comfortable to handle all this communication privately in my mailbox.

That's why I've decided to open up mailing list for Weblate. It is now available at weblate@lists.cihar.com, you can subscribe at https://lists.cihar.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/weblate (request to add this list to Gmane is pending).

I hope this will attract more interested people and open up wider discussion about some features.

PS: Now there is also #weblate on freenode if you are interested in chatting about Weblate.