Been working on a pet project to help out with the GNOME translations (as well as have a chance to learn more about Django) and the end product is now available at www.pylyglot.org. Basically, it is a database of all strings from all available GNOME packages parsed to (hopefully) help open source translators with their effort by providing suggestions based on existing translations.

But wait, there’s more! Since the entire collection of GNOME packages is available for your perusal, you can check how a certain word was translated across all packages and use this information to standardize the translation for the entire project.

Now, this is not an original idea and I wouldn’t be here talking about Pylyglot if it weren’t for Open-Tran.eu, one of the coolest translation tools out there and much more complete than what I have so far!

Right now, Pylyglot is running on my account on Dreamhost and is limited to whatever their threshold for a process is, meaning: updating the database is currently done outside of the system (most of the time on my desktop) and a database dump is later generated and uploaded to Dreamhost. I’ve been working out a way to simplify this process and make it more dynamic and autonomous, but am not there yet.

Also, there’s a preliminary XML-RPC interface that may hopefully be useful to create plugins for your favorite text editor or translation tool.

Well, if you want to lend a hand, check out the source code and make sure to read the README file. I’m always on #pylyglot at freenode too, so feel free to drop by and say hello.