Behind the scenes at TDF: L10N and NLP in the first half of 2015

Now that the summer vacation time is over for many of us, it’s time to have a look at what has been happening behind the scenes with our fantastic native-language community. And indeed – it’s a lot of exciting things!

Now that TDF has launched the Android Viewer and even if the application itself is not yet available other than in en_US language, we could at least give its description in several languages. We offer the download description in about 16 languages. If yours is not there, just join us on the localization list and we will help you to achieve it.

This is THE big news of this second quarter: Pootle has been moved two versions further and after a testing period, the server went live and we are now using this version to translate 5.0 strings. Imagine a big big database which needs several days to be saved and pushed, then a first migration to the intermediate version, then to the 2.7 which is the actual version we are using. Dwayne and his team have done a tremendous work during this migration, fixing bugs almost as soon as they were reported.

We have also changed our workflow while preparing 5.0.0 release.  The teams are now translating on master which allows more small steps in translation work instead of working on a large bunch of changes. Some new teams have joined the group and I would like to underline the work done by Giovanni to get the Guarani version done for 5.0. It was a challenge and he won it! We even have an emoji language in our translated versions, have you tried it already?

With the launch of the 5.0 version, several press releases have been translated and sent to the local press. Thanks to all who participated to this effort, that has allowed a very good coverage of the news in numerous countries.

At the same time, we also have made the annual report available in English and thus available for translation. This year, it was first written in English and then translated to German to be available for the German authorities. If it has not been translated in your language, you’ll find it here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/File:TDF2014AnnualReport.pdf. It’s a very nice document, which explains the many facets of our project.

We are preparing the LibreOffice conference in Aarhus (Denmark) in September, and we are very pleased to see that the Native Language and Localization teams will be well represented this year, with a full workshop and several talks. If you can’t attend, there will be an IRC channel available where we will report and discuss. Don’t hesitate to check the conference site, as even if you don’t attend, there will be several news here: http://conference.libreoffice.org.