Hello, I'm writing to make a proposal for the upcoming Google Summer of Code. I'm not sure whether this is the right mailing list to send this information, so my apologies if I'm posting in the wrong place.
This would be, more or less, my proposal: Project Title TM based CAT tool for Writer Summary Develop a TM (Translation Memory) based CAT (Computer-aided Translation) tool as an extension for Writer. This would be something similar to MS Word-based propietary addon Wordfast[1] or OmegaT[2], an open source tool written in Java which works as a desktop application. Abstract TM programs store previously translated source and target texts into a database in order to use them in the translation of new texts. Source text is split into translation units called segments. TMs are easily exportable and can be exchanged using an open standard format called TMX (Translation Memory eXchange)[3], which is implemented on top of XML. Any text file OpenOffice.org can open could be translatable using this tool just applying the appropriate segmentation rules for each filetype. Professional translators use CAT tools from some many years ago, thus taking advantage of new technologies applied to natural language and having in this tools a significant help for their day-to-day work. Nowadays, translators have a wide variety of documents to translate, including text documents or even files related to software localization. Since many translators work in an office environment, Word-based solutions are widely used, e.g. Wordfast. OpenOffice.org lacks of this kind of tools, and therefore, it would be an opening door for translators to the open source community. This would benefit both translators and specially OpenOffice.org, having its popularity extended. Please, ask me for any more information if needed. Thanks for reading. Yours sincerely, Julen Ruiz Aizpuru julenx –at– gmail –dot– com University of the Basque Country (Computer Engineering Faculty) [1] http://www.wordfast.net/ [2] http://www.omegat.org/en/omegat.html [3] http://www.lisa.org/Translation-Memory-e.34.0.html
