Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Closing Narro

7 years ago I started this project that didn't have a name for a year. Mozilla asked me if I can make it open source, which I did 6 years ago, and for which I thank Mozilla for pushing me to create my first open source project and supporting me along the way.

I started this project because I couldn't bare to translate monolingual xml files side by side and keep them in sync with a diff viewer.

I continued this project because I had a dream: open translations.

Anyone can contribute, anyone can fork a translation; much like open source software. What if you wanted Firefox in Klingonian or you wanted to translate a particular word differently just because you liked it that way ?

The dream is still a dream, but for the last years, my job (director of software development at a translation agency) and my personal life (future wife and kids) have and will take most of my time, so I have to admit that I won't be developing Narro anymore, but would still want to see this dream come true at some point with or without my help.

Narro's code will remain open as is, with no support.

There were two instances of Narro maintained by me, http://tradu.softwareliber.ro and http://a.maimult.ro/lmo . I will take those down because they aren't used anymore. I exported the valuable data (translations) in tmx files, which is standard for translation memories. You can download them from here: http://alexxed.fedorapeople.org/narro/tmx and import them in Pootle.

If you're looking for alternatives to Narro, I suggest Transifex or Pootle. Both have right now most of the functionality of Narro and more.

If you ever used Narro, thank you for that, you made me feel awesome!