Joomla! Forum - community, help and support

Joomla language translation to Malayalam. Looking for people who are willing to help translate Joomla to Malayalam Language.

Let me know if you need my help at anytime...

Thanks Vish, Hopefully our Mallu friends will be showing up soon! I think the first thing to do is to define standard words may be I will start working on it.

Hi Xtrance,

Hope I will be able to help you. Could you please let me know how we can start. I am intrested in this work. Although am just a newbie in this joomla world shall try my level best to learn fast.

Regards
Ciril

Hi Ciril
Your help will be most welcome, To translate Joomla to Malayalam we have to get some files traslated from english to Malayalam. The last message by Vish in this thread is a first guide
http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,26132.0.html

As for fonts, I guess following vishs experience, Malayalam can also use Microsoft IME for Malayalam. Before we start, we should get as many people as possible on board.

This is great. I am seeing a lot of interest in Malyalam. I would encourage you all the take this interest and make a step forward together. I am available for any help you need. Just ask for it.

Hi Vish,
While translating Joomla to Hindi what policy did you took with respect to choosing the Hindi words. When translating Joomla to Malayalam, we may come across some word which do not have an exact Malayalam equivalent. There are also some English words which are more popular and easily understandable than its Malayalam translation.
For example for "Login" I am not sure if there is any Malayalam word and e-mail is generally written as e-mail. The word register is more understandable when we write it as register in Malayalam script.

xtrance

That is a very good question. Well, I went with my heart and mind. There is a word in Hindi for login, but even then I did not choose to use it and tranliterated the word directly into hindi and called it लौग इन instead of सत्रारंभ...

I would recommend that at this point do what ever you feel like to get the translation complete. Once it is done, then do the QA on it and decide.

I mods,

have got few more doubts. I installed microsoft IME and associated Karthika font. But as per my friends Kathika font is not that much good, and they occassionally shows just squares instead of real latters. They suggested me to go with some fonts that are used in mathrubhumi.com or manoramaonline.com, Whats your opinon on this??

Also I had used some software which provides easy way to type malayalam. jsut type the english eayuivalent and it will be converted to malayalam. For example AMMA will be converted to real amma in malayalam. But using what xtrance suggested I tried to write some words and its really difficult. As per readme it uses phonetics. Could youplease tell me how I can master in this regards?

Looking forward to hear your suggestions,

Ciril Sreedhar

Ciril

In UNICODE world font should not be a problem atall. The "square" you used to see was in pre unicode era. In UNICODE, each and every character has its own representation and if you are on XP or latter, your OS should be able to render the character properly.

I have been myself using "Mangal" font for devanagari but did not realise that Mangal is M$ proprietory font. What you want is a GPL font and this is where you can find one

http://www.indlinux.org/wiki/index.php/ ... #Malayalam

Ciril

Did you follow the instructions in 
http://www.bhashaindia.com/Patrons/Tuto ... amIME.aspx Once properly installed you can change your default language to Malayalam there after, when you open a wordpad you will see the മലയാളഠ typing assistant on your right bottom of the screen.
ശ്രമിചുനോകു നടക്കുഠ. (I used Transliteration to type this) But to be honest, although it lets you Phonetic typing (Transliteration) with on the fly help it is very difficult to get many of the letters, but then it provides a Malayalam Key board. 

great!

i think the best way to go about is list the words and sentences that needs to be translated.

and think of various options in malayalam-

as for fonts, matweb is among the most used font in malayalam.
unicode malayalam are difficult to read using a unicode font.

among the transliteration projects: Ascii font transliteration is best done by Varamozhi
http://varamozhi.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

and unicode typing keyman from sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... up_id=5819


please let me know if i can be of help!

i or (we - 4 of us) are basically a bunch of S/w Document writers from kerala.
we will only be help in this.

best
sunil

Mod note: Manual Signature removed, please add to your profile and not to each post.

thanks sunil. that varamozhi will ofcourse speed up the process. Let go for it.

Payye Thinnal Panayum Thinnam:)

yeah! ciril

i think i wanted ask u people is why is unicode malayalam really weird in firefox ?
it look pretty good in IE ? whats the issue?
this is worth a read
http://evuraan.[URL banned].com/2005/02/how ... using.html

anyways
good going guys!

once we are done
i would like to deploy my site in joomla malayalam

love,
sunil

Mod note: Manual Signature removed, please add to your profile and not to each post.

sunil

With Unicode, all the mess with dynamic font should go away. You should not have to do anything special with your browser to make them work with any language. Thats the beauty of Unicode.

Please make sure that when you do the translation, you do not use any "dynamic font". You should be using a Unicode compliant font that is GNU/GPL. THere is one that I would recommend:

http://www.indlinux.org/wiki/index.php/ ... #Malayalam

http://salrc.uchicago.edu/resources/fon ... malayalam/

is a good listing of malyalam fonts

i personally like the Anjalioldlipi
wat do you say vish?

although im planning to use varamozhi
this convertor is worth a look.
Vish... you might want put the script in the joomla malayalam portal ! also

frankly i like dyanamic font to unicode for its quality
just wondering can joomla support dynamic font at all ?


im just Adding vishes post in telgu to this forum
on how to go about the job! so that it is usefull for others easily


Tranlation in any language is very simple. Basically as of Joomla 1.0.5, it has only 3 files that needs to be translated. These files has all the strings that are used in the front and back end of the CMS. These files can be found at //languages/. You will see 3 files with names like

.php
.ignore.php
.xml

Joomla distribution that you can download from developer.joomla.org comes with english language files only. IndicJoomla! distribution comes with english and hindi language files.

So, how do you start. Find english language files, namely

english.php
english.ignore.php
english.xml

I will now start with each files.

english.xml
This file contains metadata about your template. Details like author, version information, creation date and so on. You need to change this  metadata appropriately. Please note that this file also names the ACTUAL language file that holds the string variables. By default it is .php, english.php. I would recommend that do not change this. This way you can name your language file .php.

english.ignore.php

This file contains words that needs to be excluded from a search done on your site. Please edit it accordingly. You can leave it as it is if you like.

english.php

This is the MAIN language file that holds the strings that needs to be translated. THe strings look like

Code:

DEFINE('_CMN_HIDE','Hide');


This particular like defines a string called _CMD_HIDE and sets its value to Hide.
Now to translate this to say Hindi, we will need to make it look like

Code:

DEFINE('_CMN_HIDE','??????');


Note that I did not change the string name, but its value...

For those who care, this "thingy" is called name-value pairs. You have a name and its value, and they both make a good pair  Wink. To translate, you change the value, NOT the name.

Ands thats about it.

So, for Telugu, you will have three files

malayalam.php
malayalam.ignore.php
malayalam.xml

Once you have these three files ready, let me know and I can create a sub project in IndicJoomla! for your language. And you are all set.

....................................................

why not start working on it ciril ? !!

im gonna spend some time on it today.
:P

Sunil

I do not know if dynamic fonts are supported in Joomla or not. Are these fonts UNICODE compliant?
I might need to do some research on this.

Please make sure that the font you use is GNU/GPL as  with Joomla 1.5, the font is distributed with
the joomla core and they need to be GNU\GPL. That is why I gave you link from IndLinux project
as all the fonts there in are GNU\GPL.

ok!

but from my exp. with joomla so far..i think dynamic fonts are not supported!

please check if Anjalioldlipi is GNU/GPL!

i have already started working on the translation! - (i had some free time! this week). I am going to be busy next week.
if anyone else is working on the translation..please do let me know, so that i can co-ordinate with him on that.

best
SUNIL KUMAR T K

Mod note: Manual Signature removed, please add to your profile and not to each post.

finally joomla translation is compleate

how shall send the files to you?

attach it here?

it will be great if somebody can look through and verify the malayalam before we put it up.

yes, you can attach it here or email it me at admin @ indicjoomla . org

vish
im attaching the files here
it is in .zip bcos this forum doesnt allow attaching .php and .xml (how ridiculous!)
i have emailed u the files aswell

they are .xml and .php files

u might have to use a compatible reader for it.

like notepad in windows
and set the font to a undicode font like anjalioldlipi

and similerly in any other OS..


best regards
sunil

Mod note: Manual Signature removed, please add to your profile and not to each post.

Sunil thanks a lot for making malayalam language translation for joomla..

I had a chance to go through the files and have come across a few errors..

I am giving a list of errors which need to be fixed..

You have omitted putting inverted commas ( ' ) at the end of these translated strings..
One inverted comma needs to be removed from the end of the string.. Inverted comma needs to be removed or add ( ` ) after the number 6 Remove additional ( ' ) at beginning.. Change ( ' ) to ( ` ) of 'മെനു' Also the index.ignore.php needs to be saved as UTF-8 / Unicode , since it's showing ?'s now..

and you may also consider giving your email id in the fields of malayalam.xml file..
or give email id as [admin @ indicjoomla . org] there..

I could'nt check for spelling/grammar errors since I dont know the language but still its better to doublecheck..

Thanks again for your efforts..
Cheers

thank you very much! -  romit and vish

ill do this review in a few days time.

as for gramattical error, it would be better to be debugged after the test site is on.
because from the malayalam.php file- it is very hard to make out the situation these are used (i mean some of them.)
i will also love to hear other critique points about the translation.
It will be great if we put the site alive and then i can ask a few of my friends and some malayalam scholars to visit it and comment on it.
wat u say?

i will get back to you after the review - as soon as possible

i want to thank you again for the review!

hi

find the files after review attached below!

Great its much less now..

You need to remove one ' from the beginning.. currently there are two inverted commas making it like '' You missed out translating I think you got me wrong on this one..
You need to replace the inverted commas and the new brackets with the ` key you can copy/paste the character or type with the key on top of the tab button of the keyboard...
needs to be like thats almost everything I can find with the language file..

I am sorry I still cant see the malayalam characters of malayalam.ignore.php.. maybe you need to retype and re save it as UTF-8..

xml file is OK..

Cheers..

Also you need to retype these two strings in UTF-8 , Unicode please..
You can type underneath and post..

DEFINE('_NOV','November');
DEFINE('_CMN_FOLDER','Folder');

I am telling you this because the current encoding of these two strings isn't UTF-8/Unicode

Can you also post the contents of the malayalam.ignore.php in your next post.

i dont have a proper UTF-8 editor.

thats probably the reason we are getting those errors!

anyway here are those

for the november etc etc in the malayalam.php file


DEFINE('_NOV','നവംബര്‍');
DEFINE('_CMN_FOLDER','ഫോള്‍ഡര്‍');

below is the malayalam.ignore.php file contents

Thanks a lot for your response Sunil..
this time it worked out..

I have cleaned it up and have attached below..

I am in talks with Vish to setup a demo site for it..
maybe at http://www.indicjoomla.org/malayalam ..

further things are on the way for malayalam..

Cheers and again thanks a lot for your help with the translation

Forum members are encouraged to download and test this language translation and report any bugs to this thread ..
Thanks

for those who dont know!

if you have a local installation joomla!
and if you want test this malayalam version.

after you unzip the joomla to your pubilc_html folder of your server.

ull have to copy the 3 files from the above zip file to
the joomla folder / language/....

and start the installation of joomla

all the best to you

do let us know about your experiances!