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Re: translations of applications

On 09/15/15 15:39, Frans Spiesschaert wrote:

Hi Simon,

High quality localisation is an important asset for educational
software. So I think you pay attention to it with good reason.

Simon Oosthoek schreef op di 15-09-2015 om 10:29 [+0200]:

Hi all

I recently noticed that progress on translations in applications like
gcompris or childsplay is miserably slow.

As far as gcompris is concerned, I can't agree with you. In Debian
gcompris is 100% translated to Dutch (please search for gcompris at
https://www.debian.org/international/l10n/po/nl). Maybe you should check
your localisation settings if you encounter difficulties in using this
program in Dutch.
Thanks and I will check it again. I checked in Fedora 21 last night and it appeared to have a much more complete translation than I thought. Perhaps the Debian speed of updates isn't working out for this kind of progress ;-)
I wonder if there's a way to get a newer version of gcompris+translations on wheezy? Is it in backports? 
You can check for it at https://www.debian.org/international/l10n/.


OK, no need to generalise ;-)




As translating isn't something that should require programming skills, I
wonder if there's some missing infrastructure to help "ordinary" parents
to help translating these applications?

Indeed


I wonder if there's a way to make this easier in general (not just for
one or a few applications), is anyone aware of efforts to do this?


Within Debian localisation efforts are mainly focussed on those parts
that are specific for the distribution. Coordination is done in general
at https://lists.debian.org/debian-i18n/ and specifically for Dutch at
https://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-dutch/.

The localisation of application software mainly happens upstream from
Debian.
Applications that build tightly upon the specific libraries of a desktop
environment (such as Gnome or KDE) are generally dealt with by the
translation group of that environment. E.g. http://l10n.kde.org/ and for
Dutch http://l10n.kde.org/team-infos.php?teamcode=nl. For Gnome you may
refer to https://l10n.gnome.org/teams/ and for Dutch to
https://l10n.gnome.org/teams/nl/.

Besides that other localisation efforts for open source software exist.
There is the Dutch team of the Translation project
(http://translationproject.org/html/welcome.html) at
http://translationproject.org/team/nl.html.
There is also the software translation effort at Launchpad.net
(https://translations.launchpad.net/+languages/nl for Dutch).
One has also https://www.transifex.com/customers/open-source/, another
translation platform for the Open Source Community.

Finally some software developers prefer to coordinate the localisation
efforts for their software by themselves.

And generally all these efforts welcome more contributors.

Hope this helps.
The problem with all of these websites is that you really have to dig in and wade through some pretty technical stuff to get to a point where you can actually do some translations.
If you look at the contributors of e.g. gnome dutch translations I see 1 maintainer and 2 contributors (one of whom I know). Apparently they have > 30000 strings to translate. I doubt there are fewer than 10000 dutch gnome users, who are probably quite open to contributing if they knew how...
I guess it would help a lot if a software project could point to a single url where the translations are immediately available, perhaps after a login. And for programs like gcompris there's the added complication of translated sound files.
Translations efforts appear to be so scattered, distributions try to organise it, upstream coders need to integrate it, desktop communities try to do it. But in the end, it is the end-users who are probably best suited to play a role in the actual translations. So it would pay to put effort into creating an environment where this is made palatable for them. "If you build it, they will come!" ;-) 

Cheers

Simon
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