Joomla! Forum - community, help and support

Hi All,

As part of the new Joomla Student Outreach Program I am proposing to revolutionise how translations are installed, managed and created. You can read the proposal on:
http://groups.google.com/group/joomla-s ... 071270bd38

In summary what the proposal entails:
- Central joomla translation server that allows collaboration, voting and moderation of translations
- Both Joomla core and 3rd party exentions can be translated with this system
- Automatic language package generator and new translations can be searched/installed from within a Joomla install
- End user driven system, where people can upload, share and translate to their own hearts content (low maintanance for people running the translate.joomla.org server)

Looking forward to your feedback,

Marius

Hi Marius,

Following closely the ideas brought up on this topic.

Really like your approach and ideas on improving this, and would like to discuss more in detail how we can make this go from idea to reality

Know that some specific tools of inspiration been mentioned, and can add that I tested other tools as member of the Translation Coordination Team.
Key items that been looked at have been improved collaboration for translators, better quality checks of translation, translation memory, and in general how to make complicated become easy.

This mostly been targetted non-core localisation improvements, but your ideas add an extra level of bringing users, devs, translators a better platform. Interesting.

Feel welcomed to send me a pm. Would like to share ideas, and help you have this progress further. Thanks.

We have been using Narro already for translations of JFusion:
http://translate.jfusion.org

Narro has all the features one need for a translation platform, collaboration, permission structures, voting features and web collaborations that allow a lot of people to work towards the same goal.

However setting up Narro on a server can be a bit clumpsy, there is no support and development has all but stalled in the last year. Also Narro does require manual generation of packages and the last thing we need is to create another Team with a workload as big as the JED.

Since Narro has all the major feature that would be needed, we can easily use this as a base plaform and add an automation layer. This means all tasks like package generation would be taken care of automatically and users can just select a language to install from within Joomla.

Even large 3rd party Joomla developers struggle to maintain translations. Take JFusion as an example, we setup the facility but update languages infrequently due to the workload. If we can setup a good translation platform it would be great to extend this for all Joomla components/modules/plugins, if there is enough interest in setting up such a project and Joomla can afford the server resources to setup translate.joomla.org

Looking forward to a great brainstorming session on how such a system would work best. My proposal is a suggestion only and anything can be improved/changed to make a great translation platform for Joomla.

Thanks, Marius

As far as I remember we found quite a few issues using Narro in the recent past. One of them being a less-than-intuitive UI.

FYI, we are finishing up a component called com_localise aimed at 1.6 and specially designed to translate/create any kind of language pack (Core and 3pd). A largely vamped up com_translationmanager.
It is not a collaborative tool though and versioning is not implemented.

Great news on the new tools! Like I said before Narro is not perfect, but is its only GPL translation platform that actually works

Since a collaborative translation tool with versioning capabilities was proposed as part of GSoC and now JSOP, it would be great to get some feedback on what is actually needed by the Joomla translators (no point creating something that is not needed).

If there is something that is missing from Narro it can always be changed, thats what the student on the project can do. What changes would you like to see in order to use a Narro based platform for Joomla. Or do you recommend using a different software as a starting point?

Thanks, Marius

it would be great to get some feedback on what is actually needed by the Joomla translators

I am a trained translator, with a strong focus on the use of translation technology. I believe I can help you with feedback as to what is required by (or useful to) translators, and would like to join discussions related to that.

Currently I am in contact with the lads for the Irish translation of Joomla! and was directed to this thread. If you think I can help out with feedback or partake otherwise please send a PM.

I have read this topic a few months ago, and it sounds interesting and very promising!
Any progress with this project?

I want to develop a translator for urdu can anyone help me

What is urdu?

You could have looked that up with a Google or Wikipedia search. ^^



I'm not familiar with Narro, but http://translate.dokuwiki.org/ is a simple and easy to use tool.

Seems pretty cool, any idea when these will be released? I couldn't figure out how to set up Narro.

Transifex seems to be more than enough for Estonian translations.

same way here , i dont know how to set up Narro.
I wonder if after all this time there's not other GPL translation than Narro

Narroo, Pootle, Transifex ... honestly, I don't care which, ANYTHING but having to stay in the neolithic, sorry, mesolithic, messing around with diffs and inis. The process wastes a HUGE amount of my time, does not encourage consistency (across identical strings), spellchecking... bleurgh in a word.

Personally I have found t.ex. Transifex to waste more of my time, given me less controll on changes etc. - all those systems has quite many bugs and missing features.

Well, I'm sure a solution could be found where people who want to keep to translating the inis can still do that.

But I'm just someone who happens to be a really good translator who's not great at code. Certainly not a "Joomla Virtuoso". Sure, you need translators who understand software but above all for a good translation you need a good translator, not a brilliant coder. For people like that, a "featureless" .po file makes a lot more sense than this setup. I don't want it to make coffee and dance hula across my screen, I just want a file I can use in a translation memory, translate, submit, update solved.

Yeah, would be great whit a solution doing that task like you mention. At the moment none does, and that's my point.

Still, no one need to be a coder to use local diff tools or translation memory. That's a false statement.

There is no way I've found in which I can use a translation memory with the Joomla ini files... if you know one, please share.

You may be able to read a diff but it takes me 3 times as long to figure out what I need to change where.

And sorry, I don't see how Joomla is that much of a special case... if WordPress, LibreOffice and Mozilla can run off po files, then so can Joomla.

I honestly think it's just a case of the people writing the Joomla coding thinking there are cooler things they can code than something that makes translation easier for non-technical translators.

Why so harsh. None is forced into using Joomla. If it doesn't suite, why bother yourself with it. Just use one of those po things you mentioned. Ini's was chosen for some good reasons, not only for pissing you off.

I haven't used it myself, but have heard that OmegaT should be able to support ini's. And if not, I'm sure they will consider making it if kindly asked. Lot's of other options also it seems, if using Google to search for t.ex. 'translation memory software'.

I started localizing it due to a community request, as I just happen to be mr localization for my tiny locale - yes, I admit that otherwise I wouldn't have gone near it

Po editors don't seem to handle ini files, I've just tried PoEdit and Virtaal. Trados Studio doesn't accept them either. Not tried it in OmegaT but I don't actually see how that should work, virtually all TMs rely on there being a source filed and a target field. The inis only have either a source (if I grab the English files) or a target field (once I've translated them) - both languages are never present in the same file.

Plus, even if I find something that accepts ini files, I still have to manually add the new strings/changed strings from the diff file.

akerbeltz wrote:You may be able to read a diff but it takes me 3 times as long to figure out what I need to change where.

You shouldn't be "reading" a diff file. You should be using an editor such as Tortoise and selecting "apply patch". You get two panes showing you the changes, all colour coded to show what's deleted and what's added.

I must have slipped into ancient Babylonian accidentally... my mistake. As I already pointed out, such [spam] is way beyond my skills mate - and in any case it's something the translators really should not have to contend with. It's like asking a dentist to do you fill after they've cast, assembled and wired the drill.

Why do you think most big projects run Pootle servers?

Take a deep breath and relax please ...

Oh I am relaxed, you haven't seen me tense

Though I'd possible be a bit more relaxed if I felt that Joomla took localization more seriously (from the translators POV). Joomly is of course not alone in having arcane translation processes ... Microsoft is another strange bird. So perhaps you're in good company

Well, no need to jump on other users like a caveman. Being harsh and offend everyone, just because you don't agree on the chosen path. It's your own choice to work with this project.

I'm just a translator like you, I don't take the decisions. Still I have no problem with them either at the moment, I like working with ini's - compared to po's. Sure things can always be better, but this way/behaviour doesn't change anything. Sorry ...

Rune, if you go softly-softly for a few years and no-one seems to take your concerns seriously on the face of it (and I'm not the first one the have this concern, so it's not like I'm some unique translator with a unique problem) then "jumping up and down like a caveman" does suggest itself as an alternative option. Anyway, I'll shut up now and we can see if anyone else has a view on the matter.

The choice for .ini vs .po has been done when we made 1.5.
It was made because .po files were not handy at all (edit almost impossible with a text editor) and did not fit all our needs for non-geeks.
A change is not forecasted.

Just curious if anyone here has used Google's Translator Toolkit?
http://translate.google.com/toolkit/

Seems to provide all the services one would want - though I'm not sure if it does decent collaboration.

IE: Upload all the definition files from english, specifying that it is to be translated to language X.
Create a glossary for language X and attach it to all the translation files.

As you go through the files, you start with machine translation and can correct it. Corrections go into the glossary and then get applied to future files reducing repetitive work.

There seems to be some sort of sharing functionality so you can work in teams.

The best part of course being that when someone has a new component they want to use that doesn't have a translation, instead of starting from scratch if it's uploaded to the toolkit it inherits all the work already done.

Now for the downside: yet another language format. Google uses their own json format - the same format used to internationalize chrome extensions. However, that's not a roadblocker - it's a trivial process to automatically convert from ini to json and from json to ini - and they have an API hidden away somewhere - so an idiot like me could easily provide the import/export routine if someone who actually knows another language wants to take a look and see how well it's interface works.

akerbeltz wrote:There is no way I've found in which I can use a translation memory with the Joomla ini files... if you know one, please share.

Hi,

I'm from SDL who are responsible for SDL Trados Studio and I'm interested in learning more about these Joomla ini files that contain translatable material. If anyone can let me see one or two I'd be happy to see whether we can do something to make it possible to handle these files in SDL Trados Studio?

Regards

Paul

@paulfilkin
1. Your solutions are commercial, Windows only.
2. To know about ini files, just install joomla and look into the language folders

Hi,

Are commercial tools not allowed for for this? I don't really know what the market is for translating sites created through Joomla but I imagine restricting any translation capability to open source free tools will seriously restrict the ability to access much of the professional translation community even though there are plenty out there.

Thanks for the info on how to get hold of these files... but I think I'll give it a miss. Sounds like a lot of work just to see what's in them..!

If anyone using Joomla already would like to take a look at using Studio for this (I only asked because one of the users mentioned they could not do this with Studio) and is happy to send me some example files then we can happily take a look.

Regards

Paul