New Projects
Hi, I imagine you have plenty enough to do already but do you think it could be possible to translate Notepad++ and WordPress on this platform someday in the future ?
The localisation of new projects is something we are always happy to consider. Key in this is that someone makes the connection between us and prospective new projects. There are a few considerations: one is involvement of the developers of a project in its internationalisation the other key factor is regular updates to and from translatewiki.net. Thanks,
Wordpress uses Gettext and has multiple places to do the translations without much coordination. It's unlikely they would agree to migrate everything here and use us exclusively.
Notepad++ uses XML format which is not supported here. (And I don't like the country flags at [1] at all], but that's beside the point.
But the real issues is finding people from here and the project to work together.
OK, I don't know anything about formats and computer languages, I'm just a translator trying to get more softwares translated into my language and as a translator I appreciate Translatewiki services a lot because here I don't need to worry about Gettext, XML or whatever it is. I can concentrate only on my translation. I agree with you about the country flags. Thanks for your answer anyway.
I agree 100% with this comment.
Me too actually. It just takes some additional work (and requirements) to be able to provide such service for translators, which naturally limits how many projects we get and can support.
Fair point. There is also a limit to how quickly the smaller translation teams can produce translations:-) New things to translate appear faster than I can translate; but never mind, it's still enjoyable, even being the tortoise and not the hare in Aesop's fable:-)
I'd like to know what is the ratio between regular translators who originally translated for wiki projects only and those ones who translate for non-wiki projects only. I think that regular translators do more and more work for more and more projects. That should be taken into account when accepting new non-wiki translation projects.
Well, that would be quite interesting to know, but at the same time, there's no-one forcing us to translate anything here. New projects have to realise that working with volunteers, there is a good chance that their project will only be translated into a few languages. The more documentation they put into their messages and their project pages themselves, the more likely it is that there will be translators here willing to translate their project.
However, I think that we might end up putting off some new translators, because there is just so much to do. But that applies more to MediaWiki than to the other projects really, because the extensions keep coming.
I don't think the amount of work is off-putting. For one, the more translations there are, the more suggestions from the "translation memory" will be available; And there's always the fallback languages and machine translations, which greatly help.
I have translated for projects using other platforms, and nothing compares to the level of ease and user-friendliness twn currently has. I wish we could host many more translations, even if just to release the burden of users of less elegant tools and allow them to use twn's platform instead :)
I for one started off with MediaWiki, and took on other projects, when I had time.
I translate into two "small" languages, Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian and have ambitions to translate as much as possible into these two languages. It's quite idealistic, I know. But this idealism is pushing me on. Therefore I translate non-wiki projects as well if it makes sense. I think it doesn't make sense to translate MANTIS, Shapado and Mifos into such small languages like Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian. I think that is true for Welsh and Kölsh as well. On the other hand it would be good to have some other translation projects here. For instance, a group of Facebook users started an initiative to translate Facebook into Upper Sorbian. However, I don't know if there are indeed already people who want to do that.
Concerning Mediawiki extensions I'd wish that they are enabled as soon as they have been translated.
I don't think we are going to be done with the Swahili translation of MediaWiki for many years to come. There is no point inventing technical words just for the sake of completing the translations. Building connections with professional Swahili linguists is proving a problem. Consulting with the Swahili Wikipedia community and documenting new vocabulary is also slow work for a team of 2, but necessary for a solid foundation.
I am looking forward to taking a break from MediaWiki sometime and translating Mifos.
As far as I'm concern I am always looking for any piece of software valuable to my comunity to translate. The thing is, there are very few of us working for Breton. Some people makes great efforts during a while here and there on the Internet and then abandon for many reasons. There works tend to get lost then as nobody else is working on it. That's why it is great to have a platform like this one to centralize the job and make sure our translations are used. Also it is a good thing, in my opinion, to get other free software than wiki software here because small languages need tools of every kind badly as they can't benefit from private software because private software in my language just doesn't exist at all.
@Fulup: What do you mean with private software? Software originally programmed in your language? If it so, so it is typical for all small languages. I don't know software originally programmed in the Sorbian languages, either. I also translated software outside of translatewiki, e.g. Seamonkey, Firefox and Thunderbird into Upper Sorbian and Seamonkey and Thunderbird into Esperanto.
A big problem are missing technical terms. For Sorbian languages now the online project www.serbterm.de is existing to collect and create technical terms for Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian. It is a private initiative who plans work to gether with linguists but I think it would take a long time before there would be specific results. from this cooperation
Is there a place, where we can converse about missing technical and special terms, and how to treat them? I'm very interested from a linguist standpoint, both to learn about other languages ways to solve these problems and sharing ideas and paths towards finding good treatments.
I would not mind using the support page for this as well, unless we are getting on some users nerves with it, though I think an extra talk page would likely turn into a nice targetted archive over time.
Yes, I agree, I think too that it would be useful to everybody to have a special space on that wiki to discuss technical terms. When I translate, I always give a look to other translations in other languages I know (mainly roman languages) but quite often I find it useless as roman languages uses very often the same term which comes from latin roots. And that does not help me much for my language. Sometimes I use Welsh as well because it's related to my language but Welsh is spoken in an English speaking environment so they usually adapt or translate English terms or concepts to their language which are like a copy carbon of the English concept. That solution doesn't work with Breton because we don't live in an English environment, we live in a French speaking environment.
An extra page is better because the Support page should be for the current translation work only. I don't know how we could call the new page, maybe Translating:Technical terms or under Support page Support/Technical terms.
How about setting up a page Translating:Translators' forum, where discussions on translation issues including technical terms can happen and information is shared on its talk page. On the page itself we could put links to general resources of interest to more than one language, and general advice and tips.
Sorry, my English is not clear enough, I meant proprietary software not free software, like the ones provided by Microsoft. If you don't have access to those softwares in your language you need to look for an alternative, which is good because that way you can provide a service to your comunity that wouldn't exist otherwise but still it is not completely satisfactory as the vast majority of the people keeps using proprietary software. For the technical terms we build a terminological database since the late nineties which is free to use on the Breton language board website.
Thank God there is Open Source software enough. Yes, you are right, the issue is that proprietary software often is the most used one and you must convince people to use open source software instead. E.g. if somebody would translate Open Office into Upper Sorbian, it would be difficult nevertheless to convince Sorbian institutions to use a Sorbian Open Office instead of a German MS Office. Private people use open source software more often because it is free. Unfortunately, I often don't get any feedback for my translations and therefore I often don't know if my translations are used resp. how many people use them.
- Wordpress
- There are already some 60 translations of WordPress made in various ways by serveral groups. Unless there are ones wanting to switch to another platform or new translator groups for new language wanting to come here, I doubt that that'll work out easily. Transferring translation data in either direction can be done with .po files, so only a maintainer for these was needed.
- Notepad ++
- This program is using a special XML file format for its localization data which likely requires some programming work when integrating it with translatewiki.net. It includes highlighted shortcut keys all over, merged into the texts of menu items. We currently do not have ways to handle these easily, which should include dupe-checks for altered ones, for instance. I could not find message documentation but tranlation without is imho critical.