Leonardo Fontenelle

Today I tried Virtaal, the off-line translation tool from Zuza Software Foundation, the same one behind Pootle and translate-toolkit. Virtaal’s user interface is best optimized for keyboard usage than any translation tool I ever used, except maybe for advanced text editors. Thanks to translate-toolkit, Virtaal can edit many translation file formats, not only Gettext message catalogs. The application depends on GTK+ but not on GNOME, and it can be used in UNIX-like operational systems, Windows and Mac OS X.

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I’ll have to join this meme — even if Jeff Waugh won’t read me.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

The nearest book had small pages and some long sentences, and the 56th page was the last of a chapter. There’s no 5th sentence, but I’ll quote the last one instead: Hence, this book’s author’s position is, clearly, for the construction of a public health system with managed cooperation, accessible by all Brazilians.

Did I ever mention I’m a medical doctor? I’m a general practitioner (or family and community medical doctor, as we call it here), and as a graduate student I’m studying collective health at the University of São Paulo.

Today I installed Thunar, XFCE’s file manager. I love Nautilus, but it has longer start times, and the folder loading is noticeably slower since I concentrated my files in a few folders. As an example, my ~/Library/Papers folder has something like 75 PDF files; but at least I don’t have to browse a topics tree to find it. I always find non-GNOME applications a little odd, but Thunar is very similar to Nautilus’ file browser mode. Using the same GTK+ theme helps a lot, as well as sharing Gio and Project Ridley.

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Today in Brazil we are voting for city mayors and councilmen (councillors). The Brazilian elections are very interesting, because our Supreme Electoral Court is always improving the process. We were the first country to have completely electronic elections, and this year all of the new (50 thousand) voting machines are running GNU/Linux. (There still are hundreds of thousands of legacy machines based on Windows CE.) There are other initiatives to prevent fraud and to prevent bad politicians to be elected.

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I’ve always been proud of my translation team’s work, but I can’t help quoting Richard Hughes about the GNOME translators:

I’ve worked for companies who pay translators vast amounts of money, but they just don’t care about the product, and hence the translations reflect that. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: you guys rock.

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We GNOME translators can preview many of the new features because, well, we translate them. But today translating Orca proved even more useful: I discovered that Alt+F6 switches the focus do daughter windows. Now, that’s how you can focus a dialog after switching to another application and back to the application with the open dialog. (By the way, this keybinding is editable in the System→Preferences menu.) I just feel like when I read from Ross Burton how useful is middle-clicking a scroll bar.

Thank you, Orca developers. Besides writing well recognized software and excellent translator comments, you proved to be very instructive

December 2007 I wrote about GNOME adopting gettext’s msgctxt feature (and so did Andre Klapper). 8 months latter, this still is considered a proposed GNOME Goal. I really hope we can get this official, and as a translator I would certainly enjoy translating (and reviewing) message catalogs without that awful pipe.

By the way, if GNOME 2.30 = GNOME 3.0, then GNOME 2.26 = GNOME (3.0 - 0.4)?

Recently I received a series of invitations to join UNYK, an interesting relationship site. Its focus is an automatically updated contact list: when your contacts update their details, your contact list is automatically updated, and vice-versa. Given the nature of the information, I was worried about privacy/confidentiality and data openness, so I did a little web search.

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Recently the Brazilian GNOME translation team, together with other Brazilian free software translation teams, improved severeal items in our terminology (which we call Standard Vocabulary), probably motivated by our meeting at the 9th FISL and the GNOME terminology revamp. When we started preparing ourselves to translate GNOME 2.24, I wanted to start by fixing the translations to match current terminology. This post brings the tricks I had to learn to make this happen.

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For more than an year now, the Brazilian GNOME translation team has been using translate-toolkit, specially its pofilter tool, to check translations before committing them. Since the last versions, pofilter’s behavior can be tailored to the target languages (e.g., pt_BR), but currently only 15 languages are benefited. In Brazil we are preparing a list of useful and useless tests, and I thought other translations teams should do the same. This lists can be then attached to bug reports, together with language-specific information (like the quotation style).

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