Translation tools

[Nikolai Prokoschenko]

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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[Alex Dupuy]

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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[Lars Aronsson]

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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[Nikolai Prokoschenko]

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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