Languages and cultures

It turns out that there is a lot of inconsistency between the projects when it comes to the naming conventions of languages and cultures. So I thought that maybe someone could help me. Right now I am making the following assumptions:

1. For any language code ab: ab_AB is the same as ab
2. fy_NL is the same as fy
3. ga_IE is the same as ga
4. hy_AM is the same as hy
5. nb_NO is the same as nb
6. nn_NO is the same as nn
7. nds_DE is the same as nds
8. sv_SE is the same as sv
9. ur_PK is the same as ur

However, I was not able to determine, if the following language codes are really the same:

• bn_in and bn
• gu_in and gu
• pa_in and pa
• no and (nb or nn)
• nds_NFE and nds

I suppose they are the same, but I wouldn't like to offend anybody, so I put those on hold. If my reasoning is wrong, please let me know, so that I could fix it.

More updates

I'm going nuts with KDE's anonymous svn access. It is sooooo slow. I am trying to upload the latest version of translations and once a while it just stalls... I have to regularly kill the subversion client, then run cleanup. And it seems that they are throttling the bandwidth to about 10K/s. Anyway, I managed to download and run the first step of import for openSUSE and XFCE, so you can expect them in the nearest future with the updated translations for KDE (this time KDE4), GNOME and Mozilla. I have also automated the updates, so I should be able to update the database more frequently.

Furthermore, I have created a discussion group for anybody interested in open-tran. If you have any suggestions or questions, you can post an e-mail to open-tran@googlegroups.com. You don't have to be a subscriber to post messages.

And by the way, I've got two questions for you:

1. Have you noticed any performance improvement after the last upgrade?
2. Would you download the database for off-line use (~100MB)?

Implementation

Eventually, every plan needs to be executed. I am very proud to be able to let you know that my plan has finally been implemented and the new version of open-tran has been deployed on the server. I hope that the response times will be better now. I am now working on the rest of my plan: soon you should be able to download the database for off-line use and some new translation sources should be added. Keep your fingers crossed!

BTW: I updated the python snippet, which included the wrong URL for accessing the service via XML-RPC. Only Python implementation adds /RPC2 automatically to the server's address. Please visit our developers' corner for more details.

Plans

I thought that you might be interested in the plans I have regarding this service and the directions of its development. Recently I started digging in the code and (since every test takes some time) I decided to give you an outlook on what I am working on right now. So here we go:

1. Monitoring. Sometimes things just don't work. And open-tran.eu may go down once a while due to unknown reasons. Few weeks ago I decided to start monitoring the website in order to provide constant service. There were few bogus outages, but it already proved useful in April, when the site went down. In the right pane of this blog you will find a button that leads to public uptime statistics for the site:
   
2. Better performance. I decided to reorganize the database a little bit and make it more compact. Right now I am working with a set of 3 languages on my local computer and the results look promising. If everything goes right, I should upgrade the service in the coming week.
3. Off-line mode. New database schema will allow downloading an arbitrary set of languages for off-line use. One language pair will require approximately 100MB space and will provide exactly the same functionality (but using a desktop app). I will provide the databases and a set of console tools for updating the database and accessing the translations. The complete documentation will also be posted on the website.
4. openSUSE translations. The openSUSE translations were brought to my attention by their maintainers. Adding them to the database looks like a piece of cake, so this is going to be the first thing I will do as soon as the upgrade is complete.

There is one small disadvantage of the new release. It won't be possible to trace the translation back to its source, because this information is dropped in order to make the database more compact. You will still be able to see which project uses this translation and how many times, but that will be all. If you have any comments or other ideas, just post a comment or send me an e-mail.