One of the things I do more to support free software are translations. Having a good application to translate .po files is a big help in doing so. Unfortunately GNOME doesn’t have a really good .po editor application. Gedit is nice but it’s like a pocket knife, does a bit of everything but for some tasks it’s limited. But that was until now! Gtranslator – a po editor for GNOME – was a project that was stalled for some time but  a couple of GNOME devs (Pablo Sanxiao  Ignacio Casal Quinteiro) resumed the project.

I’ve been reading a bit about some new exciting features of Gtranslator and har to try it out. So I got the code from subversion and compiled. In the way I made some debs to have around (learning a lot in the way) and I’ve built debian packages for Intrepid in my personal ppa for i386, amd64 and lpia architectures.

The open-tran and subversion plugins are really cool. Only one plugin wasn’t built (dictionary) since I still couldn’t figure out all the dependencies for it. If someone knows tell me! EDIT: The lib that the dictionary plugin depends is only available in jaunty so thats the reason I couldn’t find it.

The interface is (almost) all in English althought the .po files are there for other languages. It’s another “small” problem of my build or a bug – still trying to find wich one is true.

So if you want to try gtranslator and it’s great plugins just to to my ppa https://launchpad.net/~amrlima/+archive.

I must warn you that this is software under development and it may eat you cat and dog for lunch!