Long time no hear

A lot has changed since I last wrote. The most important improvement is that open-tran.eu is now able to translate between any pair of languages. As an example consider the following address:

• http://ca.es.open-tran.eu

This site may be used to fetch suggestions of translations between Catalan and Spanish. Similarly, http://fy.nl.open-tran.eu will serve the same for Frysian and Dutch.

You will also notice that I have added new sources of translation and fixed several defects [1], [2]. So check out how open-tran.eu works now and let me know if you experience any problems with it.

East or West, Open-Tran.eu Is Trying to Be the Best

• Youssef Chahibi has notified me of a wrong website rendering in certain languages on the search results page. Clearly, some languages require the right-to-left rendering. Thus, I have updated the service to render the Arabic, Persian, Hausa and Hebrew versions from right to left and to align the results to the right.
• C. Jousma has translated the Open-Tran.eu website into Frisian.

Original Phrases

Today, I have implemented the most frequently requested feature. Original phrases are now displayed along with the translation suggestions.

More Improvements

1. I have changed the way the suggestions are presented on the results page. All you will see now will be a list of phrases with a compact information summarizing how many times they appear in GNOME, KDE and Mozilla (in the alphabetical order). Clicking on the phrase uncovers a list of projects with links to the respective files.
2. Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals has translated the Open-Tran.eu website into Catalan.
3. In case you haven't yet read Goofy's comment on one of the previous posts: the Open-Tran Firefox extension is available for easy installation from addons.mozilla.org.

More and More

Mikkis and Nicola Ruggero have translated the Open-Tran.eu website into Finnish and Italian, respectively. If your language version is still not supported and you would like to change it, there are couple of rules you should follow:

1. Start by downloading the English set of HTML files: en.tar.gz.
2. The search results are utf-8 encoded, thus all the files have to be utf-8 encoded as well.
3. You can rename the files (except index.html, of course) if you update the template but please, use only Latin characters in the file names.
4. Update contact information so that it does not encourage people to translate the site anymore. I would also appreciate it, if you added your contact information for people willing to share their problems in your native language.
5. Additionally, a translation of the phrase "Translation suggestions" is needed.

Oh... and don't forget to give me a link to your website so that I can list you in our Hall of Fame. You may also choose to remain anonymous, just like the translator of the Danish version.

Even More Tools and Versions

I am proud to announce that:

1. The Open-Tran website has been translated into Danish.
2. I have created a gadget which you can add to your personalized Google home page. It looks like this:
   
   In order to use it, you only need to click this button: . You can also go to your personalized Google home page and add the gadget's URL: http://open-tran.eu/open-tran.xml.

New Versions, New Languages, New Tools

Some of you may have already spotted that the open-tran.eu service is constantly changing.

1. Michôł Òstrowsczi, Іван Петрущак and the French Babelzilla Team have volunteered to translate the site into Kashubian, Ukrainian and French, respectively.
2. During the last import, two additional languages have been included and you can now check the translation suggestions in British English and Malagasy. This makes up 89 languages altogether.
3. Jean-Bernard Marcon (Goofy) created a Firefox extension that lets you look up a translation suggestion of any selected text.

Legal Matters

I've recently taken part in a lengthy discussion about legal issues around open-tran.eu and now I'd like to write its short and subjective summary.

• Some people have claimed that open-tran.eu infringes the copyrights of the Mozilla Foundation.
• I don't share this point of view. GPL has been created in order to protect the open-source software from being used in non-open solutions. Regardless of the details behind the law-language, open-tran.eu does not violate the principle of software (and other resources used to build it) being free.
• However, I extended the information about the database with links to the licenses of all the imported projects and issues around them. You, as a user of open-tran.eu, must be aware of the fact that the translations are protected with the respective license terms and it is your responsibility to obey them.

Gnome Imported

Today, the database has been extended with Gnome's translations (from the trunk) into 74 languages. I believe I can claim open-tran.eu to be the world's largest software dictionary.

Design

I have downloaded the current design of the open-tran.eu from the oswd website and slightly modified it to include the search form. It is not only my opinion that this design does not look very well. So if you have some time and would like to create a new one, please contact me. I will reference you in the site's footer and our Hall of Fame. And by the way: I have extended the layout of the results. I have removed this horrible table and replaced it with a definition list, which now includes some additional information: a complete list of projects that contain the suggested translation and a number indicating the score. I hope that these visual clues will help comprehend the list.

Mozilla Imported

Today, the database has been extended with Mozilla's translations (from the 1.8 branch) into 45 languages. If you have any idea where I could find a publicly available repository with Gnome's translations, please leave a comment to this post or edit the appropriate bug.

Translation Origin

I have implemented the most frequently requested feature, i.e., information about the origin of a translated phrase. It has been done with the least effort possible, but will be completely rebuilt in order to pack many additional information about each suggestion (e.g. score, source phrase, etc.)

Supplements and Fixes

Few things changed since my last post. And I can now proudly announce that the KDE translations have been fully imported including the four missing languages:

• Kashubian,
• Hausa,
• Georgian,
• and Telugu.

Additionally, several misspellings have been corrected and the problem with several language variants has been fixed.

Launch Day

I've had a busy weekend.

1. I have launched this blog to keep everybody up to date with the current status of the project.
2. I have managed to add 71 languages to open-tran.eu. It might be the case that I have misspelled some of the names or put them in a wrong form (I am particularly unsure about the Ukrainian - it looks to me rather like a feminine adjective), so please drop me a line if you know how to correct them. I am still working on few languages that failed to import (Kashubian, Hausa, Georgian and Telugu) and will let you know as soon as I find out what went wrong.
3. I have also populated the database with the newest KDE translations from the stable branch. Right now the database is about 700MB large and contains more than 5 million phrases in 83 different languages.
4. The software running open-tran.eu is now available for download from the project's site. You are also encouraged to submit any bugs and feature requests into the issue tracker.