# History of the Translate Toolkit

This is a short history of the Translate Toolkit. In many ways written so that people who see problems in the toolkit can understand how it evolved and where it is going.

## Conception

The toolkit was developed by David Fraser while working for Translate.org.za. Initially Translate.org.za had focussed on translating KDE into South Africa languages, this work was PO based. The next project was to translate Mozilla which used a combination of DTD and .properties files. The Mozilla project used a tool called Mozilla Translator, which mostly worked although it was not as feature rich as KBabel that was being used to manage PO translations. A decision was made to create a set of tools that could convert the DTD and .properties files into PO files. The advantage being that translators would not need to learn new tools, that existing translations could be leveraged and that the resultant files, being bilingual, would make it easier to upgrade and manage translations.

Thus was born what initially was called the mozpotools.

## Growth

The first problem with the tools was that it was possible to break Mozilla translations. This was a combination of the fact that translators would often translate variables such as &browserName; and that the toolkit had developed a method of folding labels and accelerators into one PO field. These breakages where presented as broken XML. Thus was born pofilter which allowed us to check the translations for problems in variables and accelerators. pomerge its sister allowed us to merge the corrections back into the main. We also developed pocount which allowed us to for the first time get a real feel of the volume of work required in translating a PO file.

## Expansion

Of course once you can convert the convoluted Mozilla translations then you realise you can do anything. A key addition was the converter for OpenOffice.org but also added where TMX, Qt .ts, txt and OpenOffice.org SXW files.

The key being that files are converted to PO to allow translations and use of the Gettext tools and existing PO files.

## Pootle

Initially started as a separate project to allow online translation it was soon realised that the toolkit being file based gave all the infrastructure to allow Pootle to be a wrapper around the toolkit. So a file based, web translation tool was created.

## WordForge project

In 2006 with funding from the Open Society Institute (OSI) and IDRC the toolkit was adapted to allow many core changes. The first being to introduce the concept of a base class from which PO and XLIFF storage formats are derived. This allowed tools to be adapted to allow output to XLIFF or PO files. The tools themselves where adapted to allow them to work with the core formats XLIFF and PO as well as all base class derived formats. Thus we can count XLIFF, PO, MO and other formats.

Additional contributions during this phase where the adaptation of Pootle to use XLIFF as well as PO. The creation of tools to manage translation memory files and glossary files.

The toolkit was also adapted to make dealing with encodings, plural forms, and escaping easier and more consistent throughout the code. Many but not all of the formats where converted to the base class.

As part of the WordForge project Pootling was created which in the same way that Pootle is a web-based wrapper around the toolkit so Pootling is a GUI wrapper around the toolkit.

## ANLoc project

The African Network for Localisation provided the opportunity for further improvements to the project. We saw the first official releases of Virtaal and massive improvements to all the translation tools.

Format support improved a lot, with several bilingual file formats now support (Wordfast TM, Qt TS, etc.), and several monolingual file formats (PHP arrays, video subtitles, Mac OS X strings, etc.).

## The Future

The toolkit continues to evolve with clean-up focused in various areas:

- Pulling features out of Pootle that should be in the Toolkit

- Cleaning up storage classes and converters to be XLIFF/PO interchangeable

- Cleaning up the converters to use only base class features and migrating code from the converters to the storage class

- Adding storage classes as needed

- Optimisation where needed

The toolkit continues to serve as the core for the command line tools and for Pootle. Key new features:

- Process Management