Query results: February, 2008

Recovering from eating all the Christmas chocolates was nothing. –> read it all

I am extremely pleased to announce that our translation system is now ready for a beta release.

We have just completed extracting the whole content of GetGNULinux.org into strings that can be easily translated in our Pootle install. Pootle allows anyone to start a translation in their language immediately, without requiring any specific technical knowledge.
The translated language strings are then re-combined using our home-made software installation, Poliglota. GetGNULinux.org is now built and released through Poliglota.
The starting point for translators, on the present website, links to a short PDF document with guidelines.

I cannot stress enough the importance of this release for our organization. Before the end of February, we will reach out of beta (announced with a press release) and start developing many translations simultaneously and efficiently. Right now of course, the focus is on fixing bugs and setting-up the last details so everything works smoothly.

The hero of this event is Gustavo (who?). Over the last six months of hard work that lead to this release, he:

• oversaw and managed the transition of our websites from pure code to an easily-translatable format
• set-up our Pootle install, migrating servers twice (!) in the process
• wrote a significant and well-built server application, Poliglota, from scratch, to do what Pootle did not do
• organized all of our on-line tools (bug tracker, repository, pootle, poliglota) cleanly
• bore unfailingly with the non-techy (me!) among us.

It’s his vision for a translation system which is live now. So kudos and many thanks to him =)