My thanks on the Thank a Dev Day: Virtaal, Voikko, Enchant, PyEnchant

It’s apparently Thank a Dev Day. Initially I didn’t really want to “spam” anyone’s inboxes with messages. But it just so happened that I wanted to fix some typos in the Finnish translation of Fedora’s installer Anaconda and I do actually want to take this opportunity to thank some developers. I still don’t like the idea of sending somewhat “meaningless” emails to people whose inboxes are probably already full, so I decided to use my blog:

I recently discovered the Virtaal translation tool by the translate.org.za team and I was using Virtaal to do my typo fixes. One interesting feature in Virtaal is that it does spell checking via PyEnchant. Spell checking is something I haven’t really seen in other translation editors, but it’s really useful in making high quality translations.

Here’s how (I think) the spell checking stack works when using virtaal. Virtaal uses PyEnchant to call the Enchant spell checking library, which then calls Voikko to do the actual Finnish spell checking.

So in TaDD 2009 I’d like to thank the developers of each part of this stack for making my life as a translator much easier. Thank you, developers of Virtaal, PyEnchant, Enchant and Voikko!


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3 responses to “My thanks on the Thank a Dev Day: Virtaal, Voikko, Enchant, PyEnchant”

  1. Miloš avatar
    Miloš

    Yep, the Enchant library is pretty great, and an indispensable tool for us translators. I will therefore join you in thanking the devs!

    BTW, with gtkspell installed, pretty much all GNOME/GTK apps have access to spellchecking through Enchant, including Poedit and Gtranslator, not just Virtaal.

  2. Ville-Pekka Vainio avatar

    “BTW, with gtkspell installed, pretty much all GNOME/GTK apps have access to spellchecking through Enchant, including Poedit and Gtranslator, not just Virtaal.”

    Indeed, you’re right. I actually haven’t realized that Gtranslator does spell checking, since it required enabling a setting. With Virtaal everything “just worked” automatically.

  3. Dwayne Bailey avatar

    Glad you found the spell checker integration helpful, our aim with Virtaal is for things to just work. Enchant goes a long way to make that possible for us.

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