Other language support

[ingeva]

I'm developing a couple of new sites that should be finalized
(Well, at least the first production version) by the time 1.6 is released.
So I have installed version 1.6 beta 12, and I have downloaded and
installed the Norvegian version for Joomla 1.5.20.
However, this version is not detected by the installer, so it doesn't appear
as a language option.
I would prefer to build the site in 1.6 so I won't have to worry about
an upgrade, so is there an easy solution for this?

[Per Yngve Berg]

You need Norwegian language pack for Joomla 1.6. It will probably not be available before 1.6 is stable release. I don't know if anyone has started any translation work. Feel free to start translation yourself.

[ingeva]

Sure!
I'm pretty new at this, so where can I find instructions?

[sone12]

Feel free to start translation yourself.

Do you think this is a good advice Per Yngve? Joomla 1.6 is not stable, its a beta, for reasons, and there is so much that still can be changed. If he start hes own translation at this point, he probably will get a lot off extra work in the future.

[ingeva]

I know it's dissuaded, but I'll work on the Norwegian translation anyway.
I need features that I haven't found available in 1.5, so working on 1.5
for this project is evidently a waste of time.

The translation is easy, but naturally it will take a day or so.
I have identified and modified the needed files. Next step is the translation,
but some of that can be done with cut and paste.
Different key names will add some manual work.
As new versions for 1.6 are available, I can follow up the translations quite easily.
All I need to do is detect the changes.
That's done in a second for each group with a script I wrote yesterday.

[ot2sen]

Hi ingeva

You can contact the coordinator of the Norwegian Translation Team, contact can be found at this page http://community.joomla.org/translations.html

They may be doing an effort already, and know precisely how to create the translation packs.

Sounds interesting with the script you made. Maybe share it here?
More of the many active Translation Teams could need such helping script in their effort keeping up with 1.6 translation while target is still fluid and strings change.

[ingeva]

It turns out that my script was not very helpful because the text keys are very different from the 1.5 version. I found a partly description of what to do, but some important information was left out. I used a script to copy the text files to a new directory and rename them. The names are quite similar to the 1.5 versions, but the content is quite different.
I like the way the keys are renamed, because each key indicates where it can be found. That's the same principle I use for Joomla! articles. I always copy them to a text file, and the first line of each one is a comment containing the file name.

The parse_ini_file function does not accept all characters used in the 1.5 version (which does not use this function). The only exeption is the group of installation texts, which works quite well with the 1.5 version as long as the texts are enclosed in quotes.

What I have done so far is to write only the texts into various files, run an online translation (which is quite lousy), merge the translated text into a copy of the English text files, and then go through it all manually. This turns out to be quite more laborious than expected. Copy and paste seems to not be a very good solution.

Extract from a partly prepared file, nb-NO.com_banners.ini, which demonstrates the bad automatic translation:

COM_BANNERS="Banners"
Banner
COM_BANNERS_BANNER_DETAILS="Details"
Detaljene
COM_BANNERS_BANNER_SAVE_SUCCESS="Banner successfully saved"
Banner med hell bevart
COM_BANNERS_BANNERS_N_ITEMS_ARCHIVED="%d banners successfully archived"
%d banner med hell arkivert
COM_BANNERS_BANNERS_N_ITEMS_ARCHIVED_1="%d banner successfully archived"
%d banner med hell arkivert
COM_BANNERS_BANNERS_N_ITEMS_CHECKED_IN_0="No banner successfully checked in"
Nei banner med hell avkrysset inne

There are a couple of XML files where a line has to be added for each available language file.

I find the responses I have received about the subject until now (from one of the translators) to be quite condescending, so presently I don't wish to share more than this. This may change, but I won't promise anything.