Nabble - MusicBrainz - i18n

Re: Internationalization for lists

2009-04-21T04:50:03Z

Ah, you're right - the ligature itself apparently goes back even further, to Roman times, for Latin. ( http://www.adobe.com/type/topics/theampersand.html ). I think the loanword end would still apply to English, be it French or Latin sourced, for this particular case of "et" (not now used in English) as still being valid "English", though also quite valid in many other Latin-derived languages. :)

Brian

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 7:41 AM, Simon Reinhardt <simon.reinhardt@...> wrote:

Brian Schweitzer wrote:
> The ampersand isn't English? (Totally random and useless fact of the
> day I happened to have drifting around in my head. :P) It's a stylized
> ligature of "et", which is an English loanword from French dating back
> to like the 12th century, maybe earlier, back when French was the
> "language of the court" in English high society...

I doubt it. I think it's more likely to be taken from Latin directly. Apparently it can be traced back to Roman times and is connected to the development of scripts and typefaces across Europe that were used for communication in the then still large empires that spanned half of Europe anyway. Since languages and nationalities weren't that differentiated then I don't think you can relate it to any language specifically.

Regards,
Simon

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Re: Internationalization for lists

2009-04-21T04:41:10Z

Brian Schweitzer wrote:
> The ampersand isn't English? (Totally random and useless fact of the
> day I happened to have drifting around in my head. :P) It's a stylized
> ligature of "et", which is an English loanword from French dating back
> to like the 12th century, maybe earlier, back when French was the
> "language of the court" in English high society...

I doubt it. I think it's more likely to be taken from Latin directly. Apparently it can be traced back to Roman times and is connected to the development of scripts and typefaces across Europe that were used for communication in the then still large empires that spanned half of Europe anyway. Since languages and nationalities weren't that differentiated then I don't think you can relate it to any language specifically.

Regards,
Simon

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Re: Internationalization for lists

2009-04-20T21:29:24Z

The ampersand isn't English? (Totally random and useless fact of the day I happened to have drifting around in my head. :P) It's a stylized ligature of "et", which is an English loanword from French dating back to like the 12th century, maybe earlier, back when French was the "language of the court" in English high society...

Brian

On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 1:47 PM, Z <johnnyooh@...> wrote:

For all I know it's the same in spanish. You could of course replace "&" with "y" ("and") but no one would be surprise to see the ampersand (which isn't english anyway).

2009/4/16 Oliver Charles <oliver.g.charles@...>

Hello,

Something that came up on IRC but needed more discussion is how to
handle lists of items, in a human readable form. In English, one would
write, for example:

Foo
Foo & Bar
Foo, Bar & Baz

With any more than 3 items, we join them together with commas except the
last item. Saddly, I only speak English, so I don't know how this
construct looks in other languages.

It does crop up in a few places in the templates (displaying
relationships, and other short lists) - so it would be nice to have a
solution to display lists in this manner, taking i18n.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

---

Oliver Charles / aCiD2

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Re: Internationalization for lists

2009-04-19T04:38:42Z

Oliver Charles asked:

Something that came up on IRC but needed more discussion is how to
handle lists of items, in a human readable form. In English, one would
write, for example:

Foo
Foo & Bar
Foo, Bar & Baz

With any more than 3 items, we join them together with commas except the
last item. Saddly, I only speak English, so I don't know how this
construct looks in other languages.

It does crop up in a few places in the templates (displaying
relationships, and other short lists) - so it would be nice to have a
solution to display lists in this manner, taking i18n.

Nobody has mentioned the East Asian languages, I don't have any special experience with these, but Wikipedia provides some relevant information (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_punctuation):

Enumeration comma ( 、 )
The enumeration comma, known as the "pause mark" in Chinese (simplified Chinese: 顿号; traditional Chinese: 頓號; pinyin: dùnhào; literally "pause mark"), must be used instead of the regular comma when separating words constituting a list. Chinese language does not observe the English custom of serial comma (extra comma before "and" or "or" in a list), although the issue is of little in Chinese at any rate, as the English "A, B, and C" is more likely to be rendered in Chinese as "A、 B 、 C", without using a conjunction such as 和 or 与.

Japanese apparently follows this style as well, whereas Korean uses more Western punctuation forms.

Worth noting for all of these East Asian languages is that the fullspace comma does not need space character between it and following list item.

So, you could probably do fine with just three i18n terms:

1) ' and '
2) ', '
3) ', and '

although in theory, if you wanted to support a localization that required punctuation around each item (e.g. a Lisp-like syntax that uses parentheses like ((a) (b) (c)) for lists of items), you could add two more terms for start-of-list and end-of-list (which in English would be empty strings, although end-of-list could be a period).

Sample localizations of these terms might look something like the following table, showing space characters as ␣ for clarity (it might well be worth making these a personal preference, since users in any locale might well prefer different variants, for example "and" vs. "&"):

Name	en_US	en_UK	es	zh	lisp
conjunction	␣&␣	␣and␣	␣y␣	和	) (
list-comma	,␣	,␣	,␣	、	) (
final-comma	,␣&␣	,␣	,␣	、	) (
list-start					((
list-end		.	.		))

@alex

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Re: Internationalization for lists

2009-04-18T10:47:17Z

For all I know it's the same in spanish. You could of course replace "&" with "y" ("and") but no one would be surprise to see the ampersand (which isn't english anyway).

2009/4/16 Oliver Charles <oliver.g.charles@...>

Hello,

Something that came up on IRC but needed more discussion is how to
handle lists of items, in a human readable form. In English, one would
write, for example:

Foo
Foo & Bar
Foo, Bar & Baz

With any more than 3 items, we join them together with commas except the
last item. Saddly, I only speak English, so I don't know how this
construct looks in other languages.

It does crop up in a few places in the templates (displaying
relationships, and other short lists) - so it would be nice to have a
solution to display lists in this manner, taking i18n.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

---

Oliver Charles / aCiD2

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Re: Internationalization for lists

2009-04-17T05:37:59Z

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 1:16 AM, Brian Schweitzer
<brian.brianschweitzer@...> wrote:

>> > Foo, Bar & Baz
>> >
>> I can also only say this for one language. In German it is basically the
>> same. However I think you would rather expand & to und (and) there. Apart
>> from that the only thing to notice is that we never have a comma before the
>> &/und which I think Americans tend to do?
>
>
> The "serial comma"; I'd modify the above to Foo, Bar, & Baz, but really it
> depends on where and when you learned English grammar.

This is sounding good… all the big languages tend to favor the same
construct (sure, the symbols change) - so hopefully we can add
something for this in :)

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Re: Internationalization for lists

2009-04-16T17:16:02Z

> Foo, Bar & Baz
>

I can also only say this for one language. In German it is basically the same. However I think you would rather expand & to und (and) there. Apart from that the only thing to notice is that we never have a comma before the &/und which I think Americans tend to do?

The "serial comma"; I'd modify the above to Foo, Bar, & Baz, but really it depends on where and when you learned English grammar.

Brian

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Re: Internationalization for lists

2009-04-16T15:51:58Z

Hi,

>> Something that came up on IRC but needed more discussion is how to
>> handle lists of items, in a human readable form. In English, one would
>> write, for example:
>>
>> Foo
>> Foo & Bar
>> Foo, Bar & Baz
>>
>> With any more than 3 items, we join them together with commas except the
>> last item. Saddly, I only speak English, so I don't know how this
>> construct looks in other languages.
>>
>> Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

It's generally the same in Russian, although "&" is replaced with "и".
Just joining things using ", " is also acceptable, and, sometimes even
preferred as it looks more formal.

--
WBR, Mikhail Yakshin

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Re: Internationalization for lists

2009-04-16T10:51:14Z

Oliver Charles wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Something that came up on IRC but needed more discussion is how to
> handle lists of items, in a human readable form. In English, one would
> write, for example:
>
> Foo
> Foo & Bar
> Foo, Bar & Baz
>
> With any more than 3 items, we join them together with commas except the
> last item. Saddly, I only speak English, so I don't know how this
> construct looks in other languages.
>
> It does crop up in a few places in the templates (displaying
> relationships, and other short lists) - so it would be nice to have a
> solution to display lists in this manner, taking i18n.
>
> Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Hi,

I can also only say this for one language. In German it is basically the same. However I think you would rather expand & to und (and) there. Apart from that the only thing to notice is that we never have a comma before the &/und which I think Americans tend to do?
And French people seem to do the same, looking at <http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgule#Forme_diacritiqu.C3.A9e_:_virgule_souscrite>: blah, blah, et blah. They don't even use their weird non-breaking spacing here! ;-)

Regards,
Simon

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Internationalization for lists

2009-04-16T09:41:38Z

Hello,

Something that came up on IRC but needed more discussion is how to
handle lists of items, in a human readable form. In English, one would
write, for example:

Foo
Foo & Bar
Foo, Bar & Baz

With any more than 3 items, we join them together with commas except the
last item. Saddly, I only speak English, so I don't know how this
construct looks in other languages.

It does crop up in a few places in the templates (displaying
relationships, and other short lists) - so it would be nice to have a
solution to display lists in this manner, taking i18n.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

---

Oliver Charles / aCiD2

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Re: Translation tools

2009-02-14T04:41:33Z

Am Sat, 14 Feb 2009 07:43:27 +0100 schrieb Lars Aronsson:

> Is it possible that you could reuse an existing base of translated
> phrases? Many other free software projects already have translations to
> many languages (OpenOffice.org, KDE, Mozilla, MediaWiki). Many phrases
> (edit, comment, save, version history) are likely to be the same in all
> applications.

Yes and no. We'd be reusing existing translations on Launchpad, but at
the same time, I'd rather not reuse them, since Musicbrainz has a certain
focus and lingo which makes translations different.

> In particular, MediaWiki has been translated to all 250 languages of
> Wikipedia. And you could build on the Wikipedia communities for further
> expertise in local languages. For MediaWiki translation, a system
> called Betawiki is used, http://translatewiki.net/

We can forget that, since they are using a keyword based translation, not
gettext which we've agreed on on IRC so far. They are at least using
proper plurals, but forget to use CLDR....

> Of the individual websites I have helped to translate (into Swedish), I
> think Librarything.com has the most inspirational web user interface.
> The way it works is that untranslated phrases are shown in English with
> yellow highlighting. Any registered user of the website can click
> "translate this page" to bring up a list of translations that can be
> modified and saved.

Can't view this one now, since I can't register there -- I'm re-routed at
a page with ?highload=1 in the URI, so I guess they have some load now.
We could certainly reuse the highlighting trick though.

Nikolai

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Re: Translation tools

2009-02-13T22:43:27Z

Nikolai Prokoschenko wrote:

> So, now for a more focused discussion. As soon as our templates
> are ready, we'd need a collaboration mechanism to produce
> translations as fast as possible. That's a reason not to force
> translators to any additional translation tools or to version
> control systems, so it has to be a web-based solution.

Is it possible that you could reuse an existing base of translated
phrases? Many other free software projects already have
translations to many languages (OpenOffice.org, KDE, Mozilla,
MediaWiki). Many phrases (edit, comment, save, version history)
are likely to be the same in all applications.

In particular, MediaWiki has been translated to all 250 languages
of Wikipedia. And you could build on the Wikipedia communities for
further expertise in local languages. For MediaWiki translation,
a system called Betawiki is used, http://translatewiki.net/

Of the individual websites I have helped to translate (into
Swedish), I think Librarything.com has the most inspirational web
user interface. The way it works is that untranslated phrases are
shown in English with yellow highlighting. Any registered user of
the website can click "translate this page" to bring up a list of
translations that can be modified and saved. This means the
untranslated phrases make the website a little uglier, but still
fully functional. Users can make it prettier by filling in the
missing translations. While this is a commercial, closed-source
project, its founder Tim Spalding is very open-source-minded.
For examples, try the Russian or French versions of the website,
http://ru.librarything.com/ http://fr.librarything.com/

Statistics on what has been translated can be found on
http://fr.librarything.com/translations

--
Lars Aronsson (lars@...)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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Re: Translation tools

2009-02-13T14:29:05Z

Nikolai Prokoschenko wrote:
> We have the following possibilites I'm aware of:
>
> * Local pootle installation. Proven system, but they are in a bit of a
> break right now, moving to Django etc. Current developer version is not
> working properly at the moment.
>

Getting the project picked up on an existing Pootle server is another
possibility. It is certainly faster and easier admin-wise; it doesn't
address the UI issues, though, and might not give the integration with
the MusicBrainz SVN repository (depending on how much work we can
convince an existing Pootle admin to put into the effort of hosting us).

@alex

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Translation tools

2009-02-13T13:09:11Z

So, now for a more focused discussion. As soon as our templates are
ready, we'd need a collaboration mechanism to produce translations as
fast as possible. That's a reason not to force translators to any
additional translation tools or to version control systems, so it has to
be a web-based solution.

Must-haves:

* Plural forms

We have the following possibilites I'm aware of:

* Launchpad: Proven, a bit clumsy, difficult import and export, but
working.
* 99translations.com: new system, AJAXified, API for downloads and
uploads. They are currently a bit off this list since their support for
plurals is lacking, but their support tells me it might be fixed soon.
* Local pootle installation. Proven system, but they are in a bit of a
break right now, moving to Django etc. Current developer version is not
working properly at the moment.

Do you know any others? As I see it, we are pretty much tied to Launchpad
as the easiest solution, I would prefer moving to 99translators in the
end because of faster GUI.

Any other opinions and options?

Nikolai.

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Re: New era of MusicBrainz' i18n

2009-02-12T16:15:50Z

Nikolai Prokoschenko wrote:
> As most of you probably know, we are starting a new i18n effort for
> MusicBrainz. Since this list has been dead for almost three years now,
> I'd like to hear some voices from subscribers combined with their
> vision of i18n'ized MB -- what you need, what you'd like to be
> implemented etc. This is a long-term effort so but this means that
> almost everything can be taken into consideration.

I think we'd need the ability to set fonts. Han characters are unified
in Unicode, so the only way to get the right style of characters for CJK
languages is to change the font.

I'd also like to see locale based sorting. I think that might be harder
though, doing that with postgresql is quite awkward IIRC.

Nikki

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Re: New era of MusicBrainz' i18n

2009-02-12T15:59:39Z

Wow, the planning is much further than I thought then. :-)

Nikolai Prokoschenko wrote:
>> - Evaluate Accept-Language
>> HTTP headers and do geo-targeting (there should be web-services for
>> that) first to get an initial selection of language + country.
>
> Accept-Language is already done, geo-targeting I would rather not
> implement since it might screw up badly (possible ethnic wars, etc ;))

Well, for proper l10n you need location information. I like the way YouTube does it - if you access the page without any cookies it redirects you to a country-specific domain and then tells you what it thinks your country is, doing that in your language. Well, they way they do it, big box appearing every time, is a bit annoying, but anyway - if gives you choice and full control over what's going on. What I think is weird though is that they don't really use the country information for number and dates formats, that still follows your language setting. So they only use it for some other l10n stuff, maybe it influences their recommendations or what terms of service apply or something, I don't know. But, just because I'm in a different country at the moment and therefore have my cookie for YouTube set to that country doesn't mean I want that country's number formats, so maybe it's not that bad.

I'm not sure how good a guess about formats you could make, just based on the language. I can imagine that American date formats would annoy/confuse British people. ;-) But since the country-variant of the language is often included in the language tag sent with Accept-Language (en-gb -> "British English"; not "English, Britain"!) you could probably make a pretty good guess. Luckily you don't have to deal with currencies anywhere in the interface yet. :-)

Simon

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Re: New era of MusicBrainz' i18n

2009-02-12T13:50:29Z

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 6:14 PM, Alexander Dupuy <alex.dupuy@...> wrote:

> Depending on the amount of MB developer resources that can be pulled in
> on this, an alternative to using the Launchpad localization hosting
> would be for MB itself to host a Pootle instance to manage the
> localization and translation efforts. It would be more work than just
> throwing the existing gettext PO files up on Launchpad, but could
> potentially be used not only for the Picard client and MB web service,
> but even for documentation in the wiki. [...]
> While the user interface and
> experience are definitely not as slick as Launchpad (the Pootle UI could
> legitimately be described as "quirky") there are advanced features, like
> terminology suggestions or translation memory that can make it a much
> more powerful tool than anything currently available on Launchpad.

It's too early to have a serious opinion on each approach in
particular, but I want to stress that I think making things easy to
use _is_ very important in this context. Especially for things that
are a bit niche, like MB.

There are quite a few programs on Launchpad that I've translated in
one go, simply because I just happened over a link and I was in a
tinkerish mood and it was really easy to at least start working. It
even happened for a program I had never used before, as a sort of
encouragement.

There are also a few programs I wanted to translate and gave up
because it took too long to figure out how to start. I even went
through the trouble to register on Pootle and check it out, and I
couldn't figure out in five minutes how to start. On Launchpad it
takes about ten seconds once you're registered.

Of course, I had the exact same problem with Launchpad a couple years
ago, the first time I wanted to translate something. It improved, and
I expect Pootle will too. But a few years count. If it's possible to
just put the translation files _now_ on Launchpad (or anything easy to
use) and start a translation immediately, at least for some parts,
that would be very useful. (I also expect more people to be familiar
with it, as an added bonus.) And of course, if Pootle (or something
else) allows us to do more but with more work, nothing prevents us
from taking our time with that work, and when it's ready import
whatever translations are already done on Launchpad and continue from
there.

-- Bogdan Butnaru

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Re: New era of MusicBrainz' i18n

2009-02-12T12:40:56Z

Hello,

> - Make pages / recurring elements or the strings from there
> translatable.

Done on the TT branch, possibly needs refinement.

> - Make some of the data in the database translatable (the
> table of language and country names

This is planned and I think we could wait for NGS to happen to bring this
on.

> - Localised number and date formats (remember: this is country-based,
> not language-based).

Is on my list, will probably use CLDR for that.

> - Page layout needs to be rtl'able.
> - Page layout has to cope with strings which are much longer / shorter
> than the ones it was originally designed for.

Should probably be no problem with a bit of fine-tuning, but we'd need an
RTL translation for that first.

> - Evaluate Accept-Language
> HTTP headers and do geo-targeting (there should be web-services for
> that) first to get an initial selection of language + country.

Accept-Language is already done, geo-targeting I would rather not
implement since it might screw up badly (possible ethnic wars, etc ;))

> - Somewhere on every page there should be a selection for language and
> country. This overrides the initial selection. For unregistered
> visitors, this sets a cookie. For users who are logged in, this could
> change an account setting.

Planned.

> - Set lang and xml:lang attributes on html-tag accordingly. Set it to
the release language + script on every element surrounding release and
track titles.

We'd need this information for each track first, but yeah, it's a good
idea.

Nikolai.

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Re: New era of MusicBrainz' i18n

2009-02-12T09:14:50Z

Depending on the amount of MB developer resources that can be pulled in
on this, an alternative to using the Launchpad localization hosting
would be for MB itself to host a Pootle instance to manage the
localization and translation efforts. It would be more work than just
throwing the existing gettext PO files up on Launchpad, but could
potentially be used not only for the Picard client and MB web service,
but even for documentation in the wiki. It is also possible to directly
connect the Pootle server with underlying code repositories (e.g.
MusicBrainz SVN) - I think Launchpad can do this as well, but perhaps
only for code repositories that are also hosted on Launchpad, which
might limit that functionality to Picard.

The Pootle code is python-based, and the maintainers (coordinated by
translate.org.za) are in a burst of development as a result of Mozilla's
decision to use Pootle for managing i18n/l10n (Verbatim project). The
next release of Pootle (1.3) uses the Django framework, and will
probably be available in late February / early March.

There are a number of communities that use Pootle as the primary tool
for managing their l10n efforts, notably OLPC (One Laptop Per Child -
the "$100" laptop for education in developing countries), OpenOffice,
Creative Commons, and as mentioned above, Mozilla (who are still in the
process of migrating to Pootle). While the user interface and
experience are definitely not as slick as Launchpad (the Pootle UI could
legitimately be described as "quirky") there are advanced features, like
terminology suggestions or translation memory that can make it a much
more powerful tool than anything currently available on Launchpad.

Here are links to various resources related to Pootle:

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pootle
Pootle main wiki: http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/pootle/index
Pootle localization of Pootle: http://pootle.locamotion.org/projects/pootle/
Mozilla wiki for Verbatim project: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Verbatim
Screencasts (ogg vorbis) showing use of Pootle:
http://l10n.mozilla.org/pootle/screencasts/
List of live Pootle servers:
http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/pootle/live_servers

@alex

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Re: New era of MusicBrainz' i18n

2009-02-12T08:00:37Z

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 8:48 PM, Nikolai Prokoschenko
<nikolai@...> wrote:
> As most of you probably know, we are starting a new i18n effort for
> MusicBrainz. Since this list has been dead for almost three years now,
> I'd like to hear some voices from subscribers combined with their
> vision of i18n'ized MB -- what you need, what you'd like to be
> implemented etc. This is a long-term effort so but this means that
> almost everything can be taken into consideration.

Hi there! Just a couple of ideas to put on the table:

1) I had very good results with Launchpad's system of translations,
e.g. https://translations.edge.launchpad.net/democracy/trunk/+pots/democracyplayer

I haven't used others (except manual ones, i.e. editing a text file
and mailing it to the software's author), so there might be better
ways, but for this one I never encountered something that didn't feel
right.

AFAIK it's quite easy for external projects to use it, and they have a
lot of experience handling translations for a lot of programs to a lot
of languages, so it's probable they encountered and fixed any problems
that might appear.

2) The Romanian team for translations has what I found to be a very
useful community system. (All pages below are in Romanian, so they
might not make a lot of sense to most of you, but I'll describe them.)

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RomanianTeam/Proiecte/Localizare/Ghid -
summary page linking the localization guide, how to configure your
computer (Romanian has some specific diacritics issues that I expect
won't be a problem for most), how to use Launchpad and where to
contact other translators.

Then there are:

http://i18n.ro/Ghidul_traducatorului_de_software - the translator's
guide, which is generic for all software. Includes things like correct
diacritics, consistent phrasing (for politeness levels,
personal/impersonal registers, gender, plurals (there are three forms
in Romanian), capitalization, punctuations, non-translatable words and
neologisms) and other guidelines.

http://i18n.ro/Greseli_frecvente - frequent mistakes

http://i18n.ro/Glosar - this is the best idea I saw: an interactive
glossary of frequent words that are non-trivial to translate. For
example, things like Cancel/Abort/Revert/Quit have close but different
semantics, and without a tool like this it's not easy to get everyone
to map them to the same Romanian words consistently. It's also a
constant issue whether words in English that have a separate meaning
for computers (e.g. mouse) should be translated or imported as a
neologism, and whether to do it phonetically or literally; French has
the academy to decide these, but in Romanian the academy is less
proactive, so there are also pages like http://i18n.ro/mouse or
http://i18n.ro/site that have automatic polls on which form should be
used.

I found all the above invaluable when translating things, and I've
never felt much was missing*. So it might be a very good idea to
follow this system. I imagine we'd get some piece of wiki to guide
translators in general, perhaps with this kind of tools made available
in a wiki, and then each language group would populate their own piece
of wiki with whatever's relevant for their language. Ideally for
Romanian I'd see a copy of or links to the generic tools I linked
above, and a couple of pages devoted to MusicBrainz terminology and
guidelines.

What do you guys think?

-- Bogdan Butnaru

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Re: New era of MusicBrainz' i18n

2009-02-11T19:27:13Z

Just to throw out two other thoughts:

As luks pointed out in IRC, for the Javascript text translations, pulled via a different request manner on the fly, should be kept to a separate set of po's, to minimize the size and load-time for such on-the-fly translations.

Also, for the various languages, would it be worth our starting to get lists together of who speaks what languages and is willing to translate, to try and organize "translation teams", and identify one person from each team to be the one to decide that a particular translation is ready to commit?

Brian

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 5:25 PM, Simon Reinhardt <simon.reinhardt@...> wrote:

Mustaqil Ali wrote:
> * Some sort of lexicon tool for saying translate X into Y for
> consistancy's sake.

I'd be careful with that because things translate differently in different contexts and you might not realise that something is a different context but just happens to be exactly the same phrase in English.

Adding to that:
An easy-to-use interface where you can see all untranslated strings and add translations (and also revise already translated strings and look at translations into other languages for comparison). Jamendo had/has something like that. The problem with it was that you had no context for the strings so you never knew if your translations were correct. Maybe each string should be related to a list of pages on which it is used.

For the i18n itself:
- Make pages / recurring elements or the strings from there translatable.
- Make some of the data in the database translatable (the table of language and country names - although there are datasets out there which do that already).
- Localised number and date formats (remember: this is country-based, not language-based).
- Page layout needs to be rtl'able.
- Page layout has to cope with strings which are much longer / shorter than the ones it was originally designed for.
- Evaluate Accept-Language HTTP headers and do geo-targeting (there should be web-services for that) first to get an initial selection of language + country.
- Somewhere on every page there should be a selection for language and country. This overrides the initial selection. For unregistered visitors, this sets a cookie. For users who are logged in, this could change an account setting.
- The encoding of the pages is UTF-8 already, so no change needed there.
- Set lang and xml:lang attributes on html-tag accordingly. Set it to the release language + script on every element surrounding release and track titles.

All I can think of. :-)

Simon

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Re: New era of MusicBrainz' i18n

2009-02-11T14:25:17Z

Mustaqil Ali wrote:
> * Some sort of lexicon tool for saying translate X into Y for
> consistancy's sake.

I'd be careful with that because things translate differently in different contexts and you might not realise that something is a different context but just happens to be exactly the same phrase in English.

Adding to that:
An easy-to-use interface where you can see all untranslated strings and add translations (and also revise already translated strings and look at translations into other languages for comparison). Jamendo had/has something like that. The problem with it was that you had no context for the strings so you never knew if your translations were correct. Maybe each string should be related to a list of pages on which it is used.

For the i18n itself:
- Make pages / recurring elements or the strings from there translatable.
- Make some of the data in the database translatable (the table of language and country names - although there are datasets out there which do that already).
- Localised number and date formats (remember: this is country-based, not language-based).
- Page layout needs to be rtl'able.
- Page layout has to cope with strings which are much longer / shorter than the ones it was originally designed for.
- Evaluate Accept-Language HTTP headers and do geo-targeting (there should be web-services for that) first to get an initial selection of language + country.
- Somewhere on every page there should be a selection for language and country. This overrides the initial selection. For unregistered visitors, this sets a cookie. For users who are logged in, this could change an account setting.
- The encoding of the pages is UTF-8 already, so no change needed there.
- Set lang and xml:lang attributes on html-tag accordingly. Set it to the release language + script on every element surrounding release and track titles.

All I can think of. :-)

Simon

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Re: New era of MusicBrainz' i18n

2009-02-11T13:49:24Z

In my opinion, the following are needed;
* An actual plan of how to carry out translations - timeframes and release cycles with regards to EN site updates.
* A list of people who are willing to/are working on i18n - their languages and/or what their role is.
* Somewhere centralised where translations are stored, be it SVN (in which case patches and updates are sent to a designated i18n-keeper who has write access) or web service.
* A way in which translations for specific languages to be discussed without polluting an entire mailing list. Extra mailing lists? Forums?
* Some sort of lexicon tool for saying translate X into Y for consistancy's sake.

This is as much as I can think of off the top of my head before actual translation work should begin. I'm sure others have other ideas and whatnot. :) (All this kind of stuff should so get wikified at some point too...)

--
Muz

From: Nikolai Prokoschenko <nikolai@...>
To: musicbrainz-i18n@...
Sent: Wednesday, 11 February, 2009 19:48:17
Subject: [mb-i18n] New era of MusicBrainz' i18n

Greetings!

As most of you probably know, we are starting a new i18n effort for
MusicBrainz. Since this list has been dead for almost three years now,
I'd like to hear some voices from subscribers combined with their
vision of i18n'ized MB -- what you need, what you'd like to be
implemented etc. This is a long-term effort so but this means that
almost everything can be taken into consideration.

So let's get this going!

Nikolai

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New era of MusicBrainz' i18n

2009-02-11T11:48:17Z

Greetings!

As most of you probably know, we are starting a new i18n effort for
MusicBrainz. Since this list has been dead for almost three years now,
I'd like to hear some voices from subscribers combined with their
vision of i18n'ized MB -- what you need, what you'd like to be
implemented etc. This is a long-term effort so but this means that
almost everything can be taken into consideration.

So let's get this going!

Nikolai

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Re: updated picard translations

2006-06-25T14:19:23Z

Hi,

I've added some strings to the Picard gettext template again. Can you please
look at it and translate to your language?

https://launchpad.net/products/picard/+translations

--
Lukáš

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Re: updated picard translations

2006-04-29T10:07:12Z

Mika Heiska wrote:
> I know that I can customize it to show just the untranslated ones. But
> if it had been the case that Rosetta wouldn't have marked the changed
> strings to untranslated, that wouldn't have helped me. So that's why I
> asked.

Changed strings should be marked either as "untranslated" or "need review" (in
case it automatically assigned it one of the old translations).

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Re: updated picard translations

2006-04-29T09:42:34Z

Simon Reinhardt wrote:

> Mika Heiska wrote:
>> I was wondering if you know how Rosetta handles the string you
>> changed. As in, does it mark them as untranslated for example? Because
>> if it doesn't, it's going to be a pain to locate them within all the
>> other strings.
>
> It does and you can customise the search to list untranslated strings
> only with the drop-down field "Show".
> Like that:
> https://launchpad.net/products/picard/main/+pots/picard/fi/+translate?show=untranslated

I know that I can customize it to show just the untranslated ones. But
if it had been the case that Rosetta wouldn't have marked the changed
strings to untranslated, that wouldn't have helped me. So that's why I
asked.

~Kilu

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Re: updated picard translations

2006-04-29T06:07:50Z

Mika Heiska wrote:
> I was wondering if you know how Rosetta handles the string you changed.
> As in, does it mark them as untranslated for example? Because if it
> doesn't, it's going to be a pain to locate them within all the other
> strings.

It does and you can customise the search to list untranslated strings only with the drop-down field "Show".
Like that: https://launchpad.net/products/picard/main/+pots/picard/fi/+translate?show=untranslated

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Re: updated picard translations

2006-04-29T02:54:30Z

I was wondering if you know how Rosetta handles the string you changed.
As in, does it mark them as untranslated for example? Because if it
doesn't, it's going to be a pain to locate them within all the other
strings.

~Kilu

Lukáš Lalinský wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have added/updated a few texts in Picard. If you will have some time, could
> you please look and update your translations?
>
> https://launchpad.net/products/picard/+translations
>
> Or if you don't want to use Rosetta, you can download the .po files from:
>
> http://users.musicbrainz.org/~luks/picard_po/
>
> Thanks!
>
> Lukáš
>
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updated picard translations

2006-04-28T10:37:08Z

Hi,

I have added/updated a few texts in Picard. If you will have some time, could
you please look and update your translations?

https://launchpad.net/products/picard/+translations

Or if you don't want to use Rosetta, you can download the .po files from:

http://users.musicbrainz.org/~luks/picard_po/

Thanks!

Lukáš

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Re: couple string related notes

2006-04-04T10:16:28Z

On Tue, Apr 04, 2006 at 10:39:58AM -0400, Alexander Dupuy wrote:

> Add File vs. Open File - I would say that if the operation creates a new
> window that shows the file in some way, it should be "Open File". If it
> merely adds it to a list of many other files that it has opened, and is
> not displayed separately, "Add File" would be a better choice.
>
> That said, I don't think I have ever seen an "Add File" menu option on
> any English OS (Mac/MacOSX/Windows/Linux) that I have ever used. But
> that doesn't it make it wrong, or a worse choice.

I would definitely choose "Add File". The main action I associate with
opening music files is playing them. Picard doesn't open them in the sense
people think about opening files, we're not exposed to the music in the
file at all.

--Nikki
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Re: couple string related notes

2006-04-04T08:49:05Z

Alexander Dupuy wrote:

> Mika Heiska wrote:
>
>> Someone with English OS should chime in on this, which one is more
>> common? I have a feeling that the 'Open file' is used more often, but
>> I really can't be sure. Plus of course I'm only thinking about Windows
>> world, I have no idea if other OS' have different naming standards.
>
>
> Add File vs. Open File - I would say that if the operation creates a new
> window that shows the file in some way, it should be "Open File". If it
> merely adds it to a list of many other files that it has opened, and is
> not displayed separately, "Add File" would be a better choice.
>
> That said, I don't think I have ever seen an "Add File" menu option on
> any English OS (Mac/MacOSX/Windows/Linux) that I have ever used. But
> that doesn't it make it wrong, or a worse choice.
>
> @alex

The operation adds a file or files (incase of a dir) to the 'new files'
folder to be scanned. So I guess the question is, should we use what is
standard (Open), or what is actually right and makes more sense (Add)? :)

On a sidenote, I used 'Add' for all the places in the Finnish
translation, eventhough the Finnish standard is also equivalent to 'Open'.

~Kilu
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Re: couple string related notes

2006-04-04T08:39:58Z

Mika Heiska wrote:

> Someone with English OS should chime in on this, which one is more
> common? I have a feeling that the 'Open file' is used more often, but
> I really can't be sure. Plus of course I'm only thinking about Windows
> world, I have no idea if other OS' have different naming standards.

Add File vs. Open File - I would say that if the operation creates a new
window that shows the file in some way, it should be "Open File". If it
merely adds it to a list of many other files that it has opened, and is
not displayed separately, "Add File" would be a better choice.

That said, I don't think I have ever seen an "Add File" menu option on
any English OS (Mac/MacOSX/Windows/Linux) that I have ever used. But
that doesn't it make it wrong, or a worse choice.

@alex

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Re: couple string related notes

2006-04-04T07:20:45Z

Lukas Lalinsky wrote:
>But for the
> menu/toolbar texts I'm not sure which one is better, "Add file" or
> "Open file"?
>
> Lukas

Someone with English OS should chime in on this, which one is more
common? I have a feeling that the 'Open file' is used more often, but I
really can't be sure. Plus of course I'm only thinking about Windows
world, I have no idea if other OS' have different naming standards.

~Kilu
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Re: couple string related notes

2006-04-04T06:05:45Z

On 4/1/06, Mika Heiska <kilualmighty@...> wrote:

> Hi.
>
> After the release of 0.70beta2 I started fixing some of the errors
> present in the translation, and noticed couple things that are kind of
> strange. First of
> "The MusicBrainz Tagger requires wx.Widgets with UNICODE support.\n
> Please download the appropriate toolkit from http://www.wxwidgets.com "
>
> www.wxwidgets.com doesn't seem to excist, perhaps it's supposed to be
> http://www.wxwidgets.org ?
>
> There are also 'Add File...' and Add Dir...' under the File menu, but
> the image menu mouse tooltips are 'Open file' and 'Open directory'
> eventhough they do the exact same thing.
>
> Then there are couple strings that talk about 'MB Tagger' or just
> 'Tagger'. They should probably be changed to something consistent all
> around. For example, when MB Tagger is mentioned, I always think of the
> old tagger. Eg, "Launch MB Tagger automatically for inserted Audio CDs"
> would be better if it was "Launch Picard automatically for inserted
> Audio CDs" or somesuch.

Sorry for not replying sooner, Gmail marked this e-mail as a spam :(

Yes, wxwidgets.com should be wxwidgets.org. And also the "MB Tagger"
strings should be replaced with "Picard", I think. But for the
menu/toolbar texts I'm not sure which one is better, "Add file" or
"Open file"?

Lukas

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