We are looking for community feedback on the best approaches to handle Magento’s translation. In your experience, what approaches have you seen work? What doesn’t work? How have other projects you’ve worked with handle collaborative user translations?
The end goal is to be able to provide Magento’s design packages in multiple languages.
I don’t want to talk about the “technical way of translation”, rather than how to handle it with the community.
In the German Forum we’ve talked about who should translate Magento in german and we think that we can do this togheter. Of course, someone should control the process and “be the boss” but we want to deal it together. I have allready some Idea’s how a handle a translation-project. Roy, what do you think it?
I think you should really check out how Immerse CMS does it. You can find that at www.immersecms.com. It essentially stores all the language strings in the database, and allows for users to translate the strings inside the management interface, which then can be exported to share with others. You won’t really understand the beauty of it until you give it a test run. It also makes it easier to provide multilingual sites.
I have some experience in professional translations of books and software.
The usual way of translating software is using CAT applications like Trados but it makes sense only for huge projects which Magento (in terms of translation effort) is not.
I recommend the following:
- translating by one person for each country (guys, this is not that much work) and it would allow for consistent translation
- use some free CAT software like http://www.wordfast.net/ which should be enough (free version) for that job to further improve consistency
- using some popular dictionaries for technical words (for Polish language the commonly used free dictionary is http://marcinmilkowski.pl/)
- usually it’s good to follow Microsoft’s translations - altought they are sometimes quite strange it improves the usability as most customers will probably come from MS world (of course if you’re not selling penguins).
If more than 1 person translates the translation (from my experience) is totally inconsistent due to using different names/slang words and requires quite a lot of work of another person to clean it up and make consistent.
forgot to add - when translating software, from the translator side, there is an XML file with strings that is translated. So one have to either do a tool to extract strings from Magento, translate and put them back or move all translatable strings to separate files/resources.
I don’t think Roy refers to translation by technical means but how the community should handle it. Seems like some people have gotten that impression. (btw storing all languages in database is very bad performance wise).
Maybe each community can you a CVS.
Here is a good open source free CVS. Each community can install it or Varien can install it for every community.
Hi !
I think that Subversion (SVN) is better than CVS. SVN is more accessible for no-technical user and it’s more easy to resolve conflict and make files fusion.
i have no experiences in group translation processes, so sorry if it sounds stupid, but why don’t you open a wiki page for every country, make a table and put the english expressions in it.
the wiki process will lead to a democratic result, so that will be of high quality i guess.
everything else seems very technical to me and not every translator in every language wants to handle files.
plus you already have a wiki and don’t have to add another system to the portal.
just give it a try.
I’ve translated through gettext format with .po/.mo files. Or through define’s in php, like on osC. Or through just basic text files.
I see no difference on the technical means of translating. I think main thing to handle translations that consist several people is to have one person responsible who splits up the files to a group, shares them with the team and later on joins them back for example.
Also important is to see the context of the translation. So the language files in my opinion should be fairly easy to install to the Magento in order to check the context for translations. I’ve seen too many times some translations, which is basically correct, but doesn’t fit into the picture at all. At least in my language there are different ways to say different things depending on context even if it’s the same in english.
Why do it hard? Magneto create a complete languagefile in english, with room for description on the words/sentences so that they arent mis-translated. We, the community, download this file and translates it into our native language, upload it to somewhere and Magento publishes it on the Download-page. Each Translation/Download-link should be commentable, so that people easily can comment on bad translations, etc and eventually fix them.
Localization server
The localization server project (formerly known as lt_server) provides a community localization editor, which allows people from around the world to collaborate on translating projects to different languages, especially for Drupal. It is inspired by Launchpad Rosetta (https://launchpad.net/rosetta) but is highly adapted to Drupal needs. The module suite solves the Drupal project translation problem with a web based interface. The various Drupal projects release source code on a daily basis. The goal is to help translators to keep up with this pace by sharing already translated strings and distributing translations effectively.
Rosetta
a platform for open source application translation on the internet. It lets anybody help translate their favorite open source application into their favourite spoken language. Launchpad supports most localizable open-source applications.
