Community Translations

Sun Open Community Translation Interface

Today, I'd like to announce a next big step in Community Translations. After several months of running CTI, I'm pleased to introduce a new release of this tool, called Sun Open CTI. Together with this change, we setup new URLs where you can find the new and the old CTI tools:

• New version: https://translate.sun.com/opencti

• Old version: https://translate.sun.com/cti

Even though we still wait for a new certificate for this alias, we decided to move forward and announce the new version because of the current and upcoming translation activities for several projects. Current alias http://cti.sunvirtuallab.com is still active but it may be removed in future.

Sun Open CTI - What's that?

Sun Open CTI is a new release of the CTI tool and its further successor.  The new version is based on OpenCTI project, which is an open-source project written from scratch by a group of students. The project is hosted in kenai.com server.

Right now, we do not intend to replace the old version with the new one. Instead, we will run the both versions in parallel and a user can decide which one to use.

A very important fact is that both versions share the same data, translations and CTI projects as well as user accounts. It means that already registered users do not need to register again with the new version. Just go to the tool, login with your current username and start/continue to work with CTI projects.

Comparison between old CTI and new Sun Open CTI

Obviously, any new version should contain more new features in comparison with a previous one. In-depth description of new features and their usage will be shown in a video screencast that is going to be available in CTI blog in several days (as a different blog post).

Below is a very short introduction of new features:

• Fuzzy matches - this feature provides you with similar translations found in Translation memory for a translated text segment - i.e. strings that were translated before and that are similar to the selected text. You can find it very useful if you want to make ensure translation consistency.
  
• Terms Proposals - the tool can suggest a terminology according to the translated segment. The term(s) availability depends on Terminology Database (TD). Check with your l10n project lead or Sun contact whether particular TD exists for your project. Of course we welcome your help with adding new terms into existing TD or creating a new one (in case it does not exist).
  
• Terminology Database Access - previous feature displayed the terms connected to a particular segment. If you would like to see the content of each TD, you can use 'Terminology' tab in the Main window. You can browse all terms or you can choose a particular database of your interest. Note that we still work on TDs consolidation, so at the beginning you might find a lot of databases available.
  
• Search - highly requested feature; the team focused primarily on the search efficiency and speed, so searching within languages or project groups will not take ages. However, please think about the volume of data stored in CTI and choose reasonable tree size in which you want to execute your query.
  
• Comments Addition - you can add your comment to a particular segment. Date, author and a message will be added and shown for the edited segment.
  
• History - you can browse the history of each segment.
  
• Password reset - a new password will be generated and sent to the email address you provided during registration
  

Sun Open CTI Infrastructure

Due to the fact that the new version is based on open-source project, CTI users can use an infrastructure provided by the hosting server. Bug tracking system, discussion forum and wiki pages are several examples of such infrastructure. Just go to http://kenai.com/projects/cti to find more info.

Where to File a Bug/RFE?

The new version is in Beta mode and obviously it may contain bugs or other issues. If you find any issue, please try to search in Bug database to ensure there is no similar issue already submitted. If not, please create a new bug at OpenCTI JIRA bug tracking system.

How to contribute to this project?

Even though the source code is available, final deployment and usage might be a difficult task at the beginning because it depends on complex system configuration of backed services. Therefore we plan to put together a detailed info about OpenCTI contribution. Once the article is ready we will publish it.

Posted at 10:03PM Nov 12, 2009 by Ales Cernosek in Sun  |  Comments[3]