infundibulum

I heard about a project called IRMA a while back, and their booth at a recent desktop Linux convention was described like this:

There was an IRMA booth at the conference. IRMA is a distributed group of translators that coordinate the task of internationalizing open source software.

They have a really slick website for brokering the resources of volunteer translators in order to aid open source developers. Since the translations are all open-sourced, they can be reused in other open source projects. They actually have a recommendation feature that finds similar strings in other projects that have already been translated in order to suggest translations for new apps. They currently support 45 different languages.

It seems to be the case that most open source efforts related to translation are about i18n and l10n, that is to say, collaboration on translating dialog boxes, GUIs, all that stuff — all about translating software.

Of course, software translation has been going on for a long time — what’s new is the presence of web interfaces to the actual translation. IRMA isn’t the only one, there’s also Pootle, a product of the fine work done at Translate.org.za.

The role of multilingualism in blogging, on the other hand, is a relatively new domain. Stephanie Booth has come up with an interesting Wordpress plugin for bloggers who blog in more than one language. There’s also been an interesting conversation running between Tim Oren and Kevin Marks about improving the findability of translations of content.

All this stuff is very good news.

Still, while these tools are certainly important in firing up bridge blogging, there is still room for other tools for translating content. I’ve been mulling a few ideas of my own, which aren’t really ready for prime time, but I’ll talk about them here sooner or later.