Is it ready yet ?

I have now a system that is productive. I'm using it to translate OpenOffice, Firefox, Fedora and other projects.

I want a system that will help translation communities 100%. Usually people involved in software translation deal with the pain of multiple file formats to translate, the pain of trying to follow a glossary within a translation and the pain of discussing terms on a discussion list.

So there's still a glossary to add and the possibility of discussing texts, contexts and suggestions. Just think how useful it would be to see the discussion over a term right where you translate it.

Keeping translation quality high is of most importance to me. So there has to be a way of letting many people add suggestions. There is. But someone has to validate them through some means, so the person who validates needs a way to be notified that there are suggestions to validate or suggestions added to texts that were already validated, possible improvements. RSS is the simplest way, so that is one more thing that needs to be done.

There are very few dedicated people who translate. Most people come and go. There has to be a way of getting them back. So there has to be some competition involved. Keeping track of a user typing speed, number of characters typed, number of suggestions added, showing charts, giving prizes, giving boxes to integrate them into Facebook, personal blog, etc,; these are things that need to be done. Let's face it, no matter how easy the tool used to translate is, you will never be able to keep up with en_US with a few people.

Will all this change one day ? Will we all use XLIFF or something that would make translation easier? I doubt it. People like being different. I'm not counting on that. What I'm thinking is simple. I want a tool to feed it the english text to chew and get the translated text as quick as possible. I'll have it when it's ready.