Virtaal Features

Virtaal has many features for beginners and advanced users.

Ideal for Beginners

Virtaal is perfect for the new member on your team:

  • Simple and intuitive layout

  • Colour highlighting

  • Quality checks

  • Displays comments from programmers and previous translators

  • Displays context (like msgctxt in PO)

  • Easy way to look-up selected text on the web

  • Tutorial and guide for localisation available from the Help menu

Productive Environment

Virtaal will make you more productive

  • Fast and easy navigation within the file

  • Auto-correction of common mistakes

  • Auto-completion of long words

  • Automatic sensing of the initial cursor position

  • Copying original string to target string taking your language’s punctuation rules into account

  • Highlighting and copying placeables from the source text

  • Easily find your work by moving between the units that are untranslated or fuzzy

  • Automatically update the PO header when saving

  • Terminology help. Suggestions can come from:

  • Reuse existing translations. Suggestions can come from:

    • The current file

    • Alternative translations (previous msgid in PO, or alt-trans in XLIFF)

    • Previously saved translations

    • Open-Tran.eu

    • A team / office TM server

    • A tinyTM server

    • Amagama

  • Machine translation

Wide Format Support

Virtaal supports many file formats:

  • Gettext (.po and .mo)

  • XLIFF (.xlf)

  • TMX

  • TBX

  • WordFast TM (.txt)

  • Qt Linguist (.ts)

  • Qt Phrase Book (.qph)

  • OmegaT glossary (.tab and .utf8)

More

  • Search and replace with regular expressions and Unicode normalisation

  • Spell checking for translation and original text

  • Word and string based translation statistics in file properties

  • Uses language codes from ISO 639-1 if available, or otherwise from ISO 639-3. Arbitrary IETF language tags as described in BCP 47 can be used.

  • Export .po files to .mo

  • Support for inverse colour schemes for accessibility.

  • Designed to also work well on small screens.

  • Debug compiled application translations by opening .mo and .qm files directly

  • Platform independence means you can run Virtaal on Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and probably other systems as well.

  • Native window dialogs on Gnome, KDE, Windows and OSX