How to talk with dolphins

In 1975, Serge Masse was visiting with Inuit people in Canada who were hunting beluga whales. “The whales’ behavior showed amazing intelligence,” he recalls. “They seemed to me as if they were trying to use acoustic communication in the air to get the hunters to stop shooting. It took two speed boats with trained hunters using multiple high-power rifles to kill them. I heard many of their sounds in the air before they were shot. They were also apparently young adults sacrificing themselves in order to save the herd. The pair attracted the hunters away from the herd and into shallow waters and were displaying complex coordination for maybe an hour before getting killed.”

In addition to convincing Masse that even whale hunting by natives should be stopped, the episode sparked his interest in cetacean acoustic communication. Eventually that interest led him to create Seadragon: software that lets anyone create, broadcast, and receive the whistles and other sounds produced by dolphins, porpoises, and whales.

The project offers not only software, but a user guide and technical background of the project. It also hosts a whistles exchange where users of the software can post profiles of the whistles they record. So far, no one has done so, which is a disappointment to Masse. “I have no budget for marketing it to the general public, and the few researchers that have shown interest have their own projects to worry about. It also appears as if the subject of interactive communication research like the type for which Seadragon was designed is intimidating to most researchers with careers to worry about.” Yet Masse says “my non-scientific and informal research showed me that interactive equipment enabling chat-like communication was required in order to get to the bottom of whether or not whales speak. It may not be quite like our languages, but they may be using concepts also.”

Masse says Seadragon gets a few downloads per week despite the fact that in US locations it may be illegal to emit sounds underwater without a special permit, which is very difficult for researchers to obtain. “I do know that it was successfully tried by NOAA and MIT in two labs, but without cetaceans. It was also mentioned by David Rothenberg in his great 2008 book, ‘Thousand Mile Song.’ David uses his own clarinet-based equipment and musical ears for acoustic communication research.”

The project hasn’t been updated in more than three years, but Masse says he is currently porting Seadragon to the Android platform. “I also have designs for more social networking features and also versions for other families of species.”

In addition to the satisfaction of possibly facilitating inter-species communication, Masse says he learned a lot about multithreading and networking from working on his project – skills which he now uses in his day job.

Localization pros offer a Translation Toolkit

Think your software project has localization issues? Things could be worse – you could live in South Africa, a country that has 11 official languages, which makes localization a headache for any project aimed at wide deployment. The software localization pros at Translate.org.za created the Translate Toolkit to address their need for format conversion and translation management.

The Toolkit’s many converters allow format conversion to common translation formats like Gettext PO and XLIFF. There are also tools for quality control in translation, a Translation Memory server, and many others.

Perhaps more importantly, the Translate Toolkit is also a platform for several translation tools. For instance, the project’s Virtaal tool is a powerful translation environment incorporating many language technologies to make translators more productive, and Pootle is a web-based system for translation and translation management.

Translate.org.za developers Dwayne Bailey and David Fraser started working on the software in about 2002 by developing converters to translate the old Mozilla suite using existing tools that translators were used to. Tools for quality review followed soon after, and the project has been extending its capabilities ever since. Project manager Friedel Wolff says almost everything in the Toolkit is written in Python. “Python is a joy to use, and has reasonable support for Unicode. We use many libraries, including GNU gettext, SQLite, and lxml. For our other products we also make use of PyGTK, Django, jQuery, and others.”

Wolff says, “At the moment about five developers are contributing regularly, with other people contributing as their time allows. Apart from programming contributions, we have lots of contributions in the form of UI translations, testing, packaging, and documentation. Many contributions come from people using our technology in their language teams or companies. In the last while we have also had sponsorships from the International Development Research Centre as part of the African Network for Localisation, Mozilla Corp., Google’s Summer of Code, the NLnet foundation, and other contracted development work.

“The Toolkit continues to improve in areas such as format support, quality checks, and new tools. The latest release, which came out last week, added a massive speed boost for the handling of PO files in a new implementation available for testing. However, a lot of the development (and release schedule) is driven by the needs of the applications built on top of it: Pootle and Virtaal. People can look forward to a major new release of Pootle soon.

“A lot of our work is coordinated on our bug tracker, mailing lists, and IRC channel. Some developers work in the same offices at Translate.org.za, while others only get together at special events, such as FOSDEM.”

The project welcomes help in testing and development. “We want our tools to work well for all languages and file formats, and we want to gather wide expertise to make everything as useful as possible,” Wolff says. “We are still looking for official packagers for some platforms, such as openSUSE and Mac OS X, as well as contributions in translating and documenting. The best way to get in touch is the translate-devel mailing list. Several project participants also frequent the #pootle channel on irc.freenode.net.”

Most of the Translate Toolkit’s infrastructure is provided by SourceForge.net – version control, mailing lists, file releases, and web site – but the project also uses locamotion.org for hosting the official Pootle server as a showcase, testing experimental features of Pootle, and for managing its own UI translations. It also uses Bugzilla for bug reporting, with infrastructure hosted by the Junta de Extremadura in Spain.

“I was not around at the time when the decisions were made about where to host the different components,” Wolff says. “One of the founding developers says that, at the time, there were usability issues – a lot of screen space was used for headers, etc., and searches were limited to 10 items per page by default. The separation of bugs, patches, and feature requests seems a bit unnatural. He says that Trac would have been his choice if he had to make the same choice now, so if SourceForge.net’s hosted offering of Trac had been available at the time things would have turned out differently.”

Ambitious aTunes amps up the volume

aTunes is a music player with ambition. It aims to not only play music in MP3, Ogg, WMA, WAV, FLAC, and MP4 formats, but also manage your music as well, letting you keep your collection organized, rip CDs, edit tags, and find information about songs from web services. You can even use it as a podcast manager or an online radio player. And because it’s written in Java, it can run on just about any operating system.

Spanish developer Alex Aranda started to work on aTunes almost four years ago. “Initially I just wanted a simple application to transfer contents from my iPod to a computer. I didn’t like any of the programs I found, so started to work on aTunes as a tool to read tags from audio files and copy them to disk. When I finished the basic tool I started to add more features.”

Today the aTunes team includes, in addition to Aranda, developers Sylvain Gaudard and Thomas Beckers. “We also have occasional contributions from users who send patches, which we review and add to aTunes. A team of translators has translated the application to 23 languages. Every time a new version nears release, if we added some new literals, we send a message out a week in advance to all translators so they can update translations for the release.”

aTunes’ most recent version, 1.13.5, came out earlier this week. “We are currently working on version 2.0, which will have some new features and make it possible for users to develop their own plugins. We are also doing a lot of internal work in the application to improve its quality and performance.” Arada does his Java development using Swing and the Eclipse IDE.

“We have not yet decided on a date for 2.0 but we hope to release it early in 2010. In the meanwhile we we’ll continue releasing 1.13.x, including new fixes. Normally we release minor versions with new features every two months, but since we are working on a new major version now we need more time.”

Aranda says help with the project is always welcome from both translators and developers. “I personally would like to add some new ‘permanent’ developers to the team. In our Contributions page there is information about how to become a member of the team.”

To promote aTunes, the project announces new releases in sites like freshmeat. Some of its users have also created groups in social networks like Last.fm and Facebook.