danigm.net - gtranslator

GNOME Outreachy 2022

danigm — Mon, 30 May 2022 00:00:00 +0200

GNOME Translation Editor, Road to Gtk4

It's time to move to Gtk4. That could be an easy task for new project or for small projects without a lot of custom widgets, but gtranslator is old and the migration will require some time.

Some time ago I did the Gtk2 to Gtk3 migration. It was fun and during the journey we redesigned a bit the interface, but the internals didn't change a lot. Now we can do the same, migrate to Gtk4 and also update the User Interface.

Thankfully, I'm not alone this time, the GNOME community is there to help. A couple of months ago, Maximiliano started a series of commits to prepare the project to the Gtk4 migration, and today starts the Outreachy program and we've a great intern to work in this. Afshan Ahmed Khan will be working during this summer in the GNOME Translation Editor migration to Gtk4.

Outreachy

The Outreachy program provides internship to work in Free and Open Source Software. This year I've proposed the "Migrate GNOME Translation Editor to Gtk4" project and we had a lot of applicants. We had some great contributions during the application phase, and at the end Afshan was selected.

We've now an initial intern blog post and he is working now in the first step, trying to build the project with Gtk4. It's not a simple task, because gtranslator uses a lot of inheritance and there's a lot of widgets in the project.

User Interface redesign?

Once we've the project working with Gtk4 and libadwaita we can start to think about user interface improvements, and all the collaboration here is welcome, so if some designer or translator want to help, don't hesitate to take a look to the current interface and propose some ideas in the corresponding task

GNOME Outreachy mentorship

danigm — Sun, 13 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0100

The Outreachy program is a three month internship to work in FOSS. There are two periods for the outreachy, the first one from December to March and the other one from May to August. It's similar to the Google Summer Of Code, but in this case the interns doesn't need to be students.

I proposed some ideas for interts to work on GNOME, with me as a mentor. I wrote three proposals this time:

Extend Fractal media viewer with video support and explore video conference
Create Gtranslator initial integration with Damned Lies
Books : Improve the epub support in gnome-books

There was people interested in all of three projects, but for the Books app we don't have any real contribution so there was no real applicants.

I've two good proposals for Fractal and for Gtranslator, so I approve both and the Outreachy people approve these two interts. So we get two new devs working in GNOME for three months as interns.

This is something great, paid developers working in my proposals is a good thing, but this implies that I need to do the mentor work for these two interns during the three months period, so it's more work for me :/

But I think this is a really important work to do to bring more people to the free software, so I've less time for hacking, but I think it's good, because the fresh blood can do the hacking and if, after the Outreachy, one of the interns continues collaborating with GNOME, that will be more important for the GNOME project that some new features in one app.

GNOME Translation Editor

Teja is the intern working in gtranslator. She is working in the Damned Lies integration.

Damned Lies is a web application for GNOME translators. This app provides updated .po file for each GNOME module and language and translators can download and update that file using the web interface. That web is able to do the commit to the original repository with the upload version from translators.

The idea is to provide a simple integration with this platform in the GNOME Translation Editor app, using the web json API to be able to open .po files from the web directly without the need to download the file and then open it.

The current API of DL is really simple so we can't implement a real integration without adding more functionality to this API. So this project requires some work in the DL app too.

In the future we can improve the integration adding the posibility to upload the new .po after saving to DL so translators doesn't need to go to the web interface and can do all the translation flow using only the Translation Editor.

Fractal

Maira is the intern working in Fractal. They are working in the initial video preview widget.

Fractal is a instant messaging app that works over matrix.org. Currently we support different types of messages, like text, images, audio and files. But for video we're using the same widget as we're using for files, so you can download or open, but we've not a preview or inline player.

The main idea of this project is to provide a simple video player using gstreamer to play the video inside the Fractal app.

This is not an easy task, because we're using Rust in Fractal and we need to deal with bindings and language stuff, but I think it's doable.

During the internship, Maira is also working fixing some bugs in the audio player, becuase it uses gstreamer too, so during the code review, Maira detected some problems and they are fixing it.

GNOME Translation Editor 3.30.0

danigm — Sat, 03 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0100

I'm pleased to announce the new GNOME Translation Editor Release. This is the new release of the well known Gtranslator. I talked about the Gtranslator Ressurection some time ago and this is the result:

This new release isn't yet in flathub, but I'm working on it so we'll have a flatpak version really soon. Meantime you can test using the gnome nightly flatpak repo.

New release 3.30.0

This release doesn't add new functionality. The main change is in the code, and in the interface.

We've removed the toolbar and move the main useful buttons to the headerbar. We've also removed the statusbar and replaced it with a new widget that shows the document translation progress.

The plugin system and the dockable window system has been removed to simplify the code and make the project more maintenable. The only plugin that is maintained for now is the translation memory, that's now integrated. I'm planning to migrate other useful plugins, but that's for the future.

Other minor changes that we've made are in the message table, we've removed some columns and now we only show two, the original message and the translated one and we use colors and text styles to show fuzzy status and untranslated.

The main work is a full code modernization, now we use meson to build, we've flatpak integration and this simplify the development because gtranslator know works by default in Gnome Builder without the need to install development dependencies.

There's others minor changes like the new look when you open the app without any file:

Or the new language selector that autofill all the profile fields using the language:

And for sure we've tried to fix most important bugs:

New name and new Icon

Following the modern GNOME app names, we've renamed the app from Gtranslator to GNOME Translation Editor. Internally we'll continue with the gtranslator name, so the app is gtranslator, but for the final user the name will be Translation Editor.

And following the App Icon Redesign Initiative we've a new icon that follows the new HIG.

Thanks

I'm not doing this alone. I became the gtranslator maintainer because Daniel Mustieles push to have a modern tool for GNOME translators, done with gnome technology and fully functional.

The GNOME Translation Editor is a project done by the GNOME community, there are other people helping with code, documentation, testing, design ideas and much more and any help is always welcome. If you're insterested, don't hesitate and come to the gnome gitlab and collaborate with this great project.

And maybe it's a bit late, but I've publish a project to the outreachy.org, so maybe someone can work on this as an intern for three months. I'll try to get more people involved here using following outreachy and maybe GSoC, so if you're a student, now is the right time to start contributing to be able to be selected for the next year internship programs.

Gtranslator Resurrection

danigm — Mon, 10 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0200

The last week I received a telegram message about Gtranslator, that was unmaintained for a long time. GNOME translators uses different tools to translate .po files, Gtranslator is a tool for translator that is integrated with the GNOME desktop, but with the time, Gtranslator is getting old and there are several known bugs that never get fixed.

So I decided to go ahead and become the maintainer of Gtranslator with the main idea of update the interface and fix mayor bugs.

Why we should care about Gtranslator

PO files are plain text files that can be edited with any text editor, but there're a lot of tools for translator to simplify the edition of .po files, these way the program will avoid formatting problems and can also provide some tools to help in the translation.

There's a lot of tools to edit .po files, so, why we need another application? why translators can't pick another useful tool if Gtranslator is unmaintained?

The main reason is the same as we've a text editor or the gnome-builder or other developer tools, because all users want to use applications integrated in the desktop, so it always will be better for a GNOME user a native GNOME app to edit .po files than a Qt one or a webpage.

The other reason is that we need to simplify the translators life to have better and more translations and that can only be done if we're developping the tool that translator will use, because in the future we can integrate Gtranslator with the gnome gitlab, or with Damned Lies, to download or upload translation files.

What's the plan

Gtranslator has a GNOME 2.0 interface, with toolbar, menus, statusbar and dockable widgets:

But in the git repo, the main branch was broken. Someone starts a big refactor, in 2015, to try to update the interface to look more like a modern GNOME 3 application but that refactor never ended so the master branch compiles, but doesn't do anything. There was a lot of widgets that was half ported to a modern code.

There's also some designs to modernize the interface, but the work wasn't finished.

My plan is to continue that work, modernize the UI, remove all deprecated code and warnings and then continue the development from there.

I don't want to spend a lot of time reworking the whole app to have a new one in two months, I want to have a functional app as soon as possible, and continue with a continuous development, improving the UI and the functionality needed by the translator team.

So the roadmap that I've in mind is:

Fix the current master state
Fix the known bugs
Redesign the interface
Enhance linking with Damned Lies

What I've done in one week

I started updating the build system, from autotools to meson build, and then I've added a flatpak manifest file, so now gnome-builder is able to build Gtranslator using meson and flatpak and it's easier to develop this way.

This build tools modernization is great because with the new gitlab we've now continuous integration, and that means that the gitlab compiles and generates a flatpak bundle for each commit, making it easier for testers to test new functionality or Merge Requests, you only need to download the .flatpak and install locally, no need to build at all.

Then I started to fix the master branch. There was a project selector view and then you go to the translation view. There was only the .ui files and not working yet, so I reworked that a bit and convert the project selector to a file selector for now and then when you select a file, you've almost the same old interface, but without the menu, toolbar and statusbar.

I've been moving the toolbar icons to the headerbar so we can have the main functionality working. We've now a functional application.

Plugins

Gtranslator has a plugin system and has eight plugins, but that plugins was disabled some time ago. So I've started to recover that functionality but instead of as plugins, I've started to move the plugins to the core app code.

The only plugin ported currently is the translation memory. I'll take a look to the other plugins and view if it's desirable to reimplement that or remove that code.

What's next

All the statusbar functionality is missing right now, I need to find some place in the new UI to show that.

I wan't to start as soon as possible to work in a new widget to show messages, instead of the current table.

The project selection part is a bit hard because I need to think about what's a project in this context. Currently Gtranslator is a .po file editor, but if we change that to manage projects like a group of .po files, I need to think about how to store that information and the easier way for translator to use the interface.

So if you've time and want to contribute in this project, go ahead, you can ask in the #gtranslator IRC channel or talk to me directly. Currently there's no a lot of issues in the gitlab, but as soon as I get a functional version in gnome-nightly flatpak repo and some translators starts to use it, we'll have a lot of things to do.