OOo Translation Project Updated

I haven't post anything about OOo translation project which i maintain since few year ago. In the past, we used CVS server hosted at Sourceforge to help us coordinate the work of translating OpenOffice.org 2.x source which consists approximately 12000 words and it's increasing into nearly 17000 on OpenOffice.org 3.x.

The translation works well, even though we had several time a vacuum condition due to lost of interest (probably) and busy doing our daily task (besides it's a voluntary project). We managed to get around 80% of the translations before OOo 3.0 was released.

Sun Microsystem has generously facilitates the work for OOo 3.x translations and onwards by hosting a Pootle site which can be used to translate OOo 3.x online via web browser. The big advantage of using Pootle is that we can do this anytime and anywhere, as long as we have Internet connection and browser (which i assume it's always available on every computer). It reduces the maintainer's work to syncronize with the upstream source as OOo translations are very quick to change. By using Pootle, we don't have to worry about such merging with newer version as it was done by the administrator.

So finally i joined Pootle and Aijin Kim helped me with the administration for Indonesian section. I pushed the translation that were done on OOo 2.x into Pootle so that we didn't have to start over from 0. In short, we can start working on OOo 3.x translations very fast.

In Pootle, there are two sub project for OOo, which are OOo UI and OOo Help. The UI deals with the main menus, options, dialog, and so on, while the Help deals with the Help section. Today, i have just committed the last update for OOo UI project and we finally managed to get it done 100%.

I'm not saying that the work is over, because there were a lot of inconsistency during our translation, because lots of people are working on this project. So our next step is to review all of our translations and use similar terms in all translations so people will not be confused.

By the way, i have updated the Indonesian OOo Translation Project Wiki entry with Pootle and removed the SF entry to reflect the latest changes. You can help us by joining Pootle and contribute for OOo Help or review our work on OOo UI.