Forum .LRN Q&A: The .LRN UI is ready for translation

We have now finished the work converting the .LRN UI to using a message catalog so that it can be translated to various languages.

We are setting up a server for Heidelberg so that they can start translating the .LRN UI to German. If there is interest in helping translate .LRN to other languages - let us know.

If you follow the .LRN installation instructions, visit /acs-lang/admin and activate translator mode you can browse the UI and translate any strings that you come across. You can also visit the translation UI at /acs-lang/admin and translate messages in bulk.

Will this translation be usable for plain OpenACS ?

So just to make this absolutely clear: Yes, all the infrastructure work we've done for internationalization is done as part of OpenACS, so everything will work without dotLRN as well.

What we have *not* done is convert each and every package there is in OpenACS to use the message catalog. We've only converted packages that are used by a typical dotLRN installation.

Thus, we'll encourage others to convert the remaining packages as they need them. We have provided very powerful tools to help with this work, and the documentation is even somewhat usable 😉

/Lars

Simon,
the I18N effort certainly needs some coordination, I suggest we setup a project page at openacs/org/projects that would also link to collaboraid.biz/extranet/i18n where we already have a lot of information gathered on the subject. If someone would grant me admin rights on openacs.org I could add I18N as an OpenACS project.

We can help in Greek translation here

There is still a major problem of AOLserver support.
acs-lang requires ad13 and I personally don't feel like using that AOLserver (for a multitude of reasons).

While I feel this is excellent for the future, I for one won't be able to use this as all my sites use 3.5.1. Anyone else who has upgraded will be in the same boat. This is why it needs to be able to be turned off. And since acs-lang is in the OpenACS 4.6 release schedule I think it is a bad thing indeed.

I want to congratulate Collaboraid (and everyone that has helped them) on this too. The translator mode rocks! It makes it possible for ANYONE to work on a translation, because they see the results of their translation in context.

Alexander, Greek would be great, the i18n work is not finished yet and having you work with Greek would be good (so we can iron out any problems that have to do with some of the more beautiful and rare charsets of the world). Please follow the i18n project site ( http://www.collaboraid.biz/extranet/i18n/ ). Is there anyone who could do some testing with some Asian languages?

Jon, almost all of the bugfixes have been made on the 4.6 branch and not merged to the HEAD (and if you are aware of any that were not made on the 4.6 branch please let me know so I can merge them). The plan has been to make all the bug fixes coming out of QA on 4.6 and merge to the head after the 4.6 release.

The HEAD has the collaboraid i18n work and 4.6 does not (and won't ever I don't think).

I am planning on trying to make sure any bug fixes on the HEAD get backported to 4.6 and have 4.6 have an extended release cycle (more frequent QA'd minor releases) so that it will be a good basis for building a site. I think this is important since 4.7 will be a rough ride and is a long way off.

Peter,

I think setting a server for the translation process would be a great idea. I would certainly be interested to do the translation to Finnish.

Btw, I just want to mention that we haven't yet covered charsets in the i18n process, so you'll probably not be able to translate to languages that uses different alphabets just now.

Although perhaps we can just set the translation server to serve everything in Unicode, and we might be fine. We'd have to test that.

/Lars

Congratulations. It's great news. I'm willing to collaborate / translate to Dutch.

Thanks for all the interest in translation - I'm overwhelmed! 😊 I've setup translate.dotlrn.collaboraid.net now and everybody that was registered can now start translating. Here is your kick-start guide:

1) Visit /acs-lang and choose the locale that you are translating to. If the locale is not present you need to visit /acs-lang/admin and create the locale (see below).
2) Visit /acs-lang/admin and activate translator mode
3) Visit dotlrn and start translating
4) Alternative approach to translation is to visit /acs-lang/admin and translate messages in bulk.

I've configured the server to return UTF8. Currently, only the following locales are in the system

Danish
French
German
Japanes
Spanish

New locales can be created at /acs-lang/admin. Let me know if you have problems with this. Most importantly - make sure you get the right ISO 639 two letter language code and the right ISO 3166 country code for the locale. Here are codes that I found via Google:

http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/related/iso639.txt
http://userpage.chemie.fu-berlin.de/diverse/doc/ISO_3166.html

Currently myself, Carl Robert Blesius and Caroline are site-wide admins on the server. Note for site-wide admins: translators should be added as professors so that they have admin privilege on the acs-lang package.

I hacked togehter a feature that makes it possible to see previous translations (a very light-weight version history if you will). This is useful if you want to recover an old translation.

Thanks Lars for helping me get UTF8 to work on the server. In case someone is interested - here is what I have in the config file:

ns_param  OutputCharset utf-8
ns_param  HackContentType true
ns_param  DefaultCharset utf-8

Peter, It looks very sophisticated. It's a compliment that it was easy to get started.

As you know, the context of a sentence or word is most important. You made the package name available and I can change the locale, but is there any chance you can make even more information available while translating (like a row underneath with name of file and/or surrounding characters)? This would make translating more accurate.
Also, it would become easier to decide how to deal with keys/entries, like dotlrn's 'arhive_group_name', or 'class_may_not_be_deleted' or 'Class Key' (do they need normal translation?).

Finally, is there any version control mechanism in case the original english version changes? I suppose the english version is leading?

Thanks for the great feedback and all the translations guys! We currently have over 20 translators on the server.

Jarkko: you should all be able to access the dotlrn admin pages now. Your points about prepositions and problems with pretty names that will have different translations depending on the context are good. We are going to have to deal with those cases. Keep me posted on exactly which keys cause problems and we'll find ways to change the key structure if you can't find workarounds. I'll take the time to answer emails you've sent me now that I'm back from a conference.

Aldert: For context information I added a listing on the edit page that lists the lines of the files where the message key is used for lookups. Let me know what you think!

Here is what we have translated so far:

select locale, count(*) from lang_messages group by locale;

LOCALE                          COUNT(*)
------------------------------ ----------
da_DK                                492
de_DE                                286
en_US                                1502
es_ES                                170
fi_FI                                994
fr_FR                                  4
nl_NL                                115
sv_SE                                  5

8 rows selected.

Oh my god Jarkko - are you translating around the clock? 994 messages is amazing!

Great translation tool!!!

New idea concerning olympic spirit... There should always be the count of translated locales on the right top of the pages. It would tell you on which place your country is currently ranked and how many items you still have to translate to move one place up 😊

Wow, there seems to be a lot of persons interested in this effort...

Anyway, I just wanted to note that I'm available to do some Danish translations (as I've told Peter previously), and I might even aim to get Danish back on top, Jarkko...

While translating I realized that sometime the tags are to small, like taking just one word, where the whole meaning is only grasped if you take two words together. And a word to word translation sucks, as e.g. in German we have a different order of words than used in English (as you can see in this posting 😊). Is there any way to suggest some other structuring of the to translated text?

Example: English "Join Class" (two words, seperatly translated) results in German "Beitreten Klasse". Uarggg... In German the ordering is just the other way round "Klasse beitreten". So instead of having two seperate words, we need one translation for "Join Class" as a whole, instead of "Join" and "Class".

I'd at least offer the possibility. Though I'd default to the primary locale (eg en), when no value is given for (en_GB). No need to translate things that are already right.

Peter,

Every message key consisting just of one preposition (at, in, etc.) is problematic, as there is no such thing in Finnish.

I'll return to pretty plurals problem more precisely when I've shuffled a bit around the pages and found problematic messages.

Peter,

Could we make a bug tracker instance for keeping account of those problematic messages?

I just found one: classes_pretty_name that is used both in "new subject" and "subject name". There's no way getting around that in Finnish because the first is the basic form and the second is actually a genetive form.

OK, now I really got to run to catch the train. Over 1000 messages accomplished. I'll be back in business on Sunday. Hopefully someone has really challenged me then...

Why does it seem to always switch off translator mode automatically after some time? This is a bit annoying ...

Luigi,

I also mentioned the YYYYMMDD problem... it should be fixed when they update the translation server. The images problem is a good point too.

This might help you find some people to help with Italian: https://openacs.org/directory/index?search=.it

Carl

It looks like we have a winner... if the olympic chart reflects, what I think it does... Congratulations Poland!

Congratulations to you too. You still outdid the rest of us.

Peter,
You're 'message key usage' sure helps to figure out what the context of words is. I think it's sufficient, though real translators will surely argue otherwise.
However, it would help to have 'Messages that are translated' ordered by 'Translated Message'. I think Marcin could need such a table too.
In the end, when everything is translated, one might need a complete ordered list (not per package) to edit the results of translations.

Why does it seem to always switch off translator mode automatically after some time? This is a bit annoying ...

Tillman,

That's because we're using ad_set_client_property, which happens to expire along with your session cookie.

This is an annoying 'feature' of client properties which we should consider fixing, so that at least, when your session cookie is re-issued, e.g. when you have a permanent login cookie present, we'll move your session properties to the new session. Did somebody put that on his/her todo list? /Lars

Jon,

Yes, Vd. is not used "in the spanish streets" but in the university, speaking to Doctors and Professors, we use the Usted verbal form, for "politesse". That is in Spain but in Latin America, the Vd. form is sometime use as the "tu" or "vosotros". I think that in Argentina they still use the "Vos" form too. In spain, a report is called a "informe" and in latin america a "reporte", and so on...

We understand each other, as american british and australian, but we don't use the same vocabulary.

Hello fellow translators,

I have found an interesting technical glossary translation (also opensource). There are some terms that given the nature of OpenACS are not covered there. However, there are plenty of terms that we use on the translation that might help you out.

The glossary covers languages such as:

• English
• German
• Spanish
• French
• Italian
• Portuguese
• Brazilian Portuguese

http://opensource.bureau-cornavin.com/glossary/index.html

Take a look as it might help you with some of the words you are currently struggle to translate.

Y'all take it easy,

Ernie

Hi Jon,

In spanish, we use Vd. and Ud. with identical meaning.
I didn't know that in other countries it could have a different use.

RE: Vd. (this really should go on another thread) The difference lies in the degree of formality conveyed by the speaker. However, the vosotros form is mainly used in Spain (and a few South American countries). Throughout Latin America, "ustedes" is used in both formal and informal situations to refer to "you-all."

According to my Dominican friends, Lawyers and certain other professions learn this form when they go to College. It is not generally taught.

I will start a locale for the Caribe and do some translations. I am not a native speaker (I learned just by living in those countries) so I won't be able to do a lot, I will ask my wife to help also.

Aldert,

Using the translation server for discussion is a good idea, but a record of discussion will probably be lost when the server is updated. For that reason the dotLRN development forum is probably a good place for the discussion. I doubt there would be any resistance to a discussion taking place in Dutch, just start a new Dutch thread.

I gave you admin privileges on the NL community. You should have all the needed privileges for testing the class you added. Right now there are no department or subject based privileges, although this is something (along with faculty based privileges) that dotLRN will eventually need as large institutions like our own go live.

Carl