Forum .LRN Q&A: May the Translation Work Continue

I just wanted to announce here that the dotLRN Translation Server has now been upgraded with the latest source code and message keys.

With the new message keys we have shifted towards translating phrases rather than single words. More details are at the translation server.

Yes, splendid. It's essential for use of dotLRN/OACS in Europe.
There is a message 'Date as YYYYMMDD'. Would that be translated to DDMMYYYY if applicable, or should dates always be entered as YYYYMMDD.

Is there any project to translate the documentation too? I know that it's difficult to keep it updated because documentation is improved all the time but it would be interesting.

Ok, Peter. It would be very useful for non-english readers.

On the other hand, Santiago (mailto:shermira@wanadoo.es), who works with me at UNED, want to join to help us with the spanish translation. He has registered at http://translate.dotlrn.collaboraid.net/. Is it posible to give him access to acs-lang/admin?
Thanks.

We finished the spanish translation but since some phrases are from admin and site-admin interfaces, we couldn't review this part. I don't now if the translation is available from the CVS repository, if it is, we can install a local instance at our office to review the translation.

Next week +/-, I will go on with the french translation. Is there anybody on it or who can help?

Christian,
there is currently no way to download the latest versions of the message catalogs from the translation server. However, I intend to commit the message catalog XML files to CVS on a regular basis. I'll try to do so this week. If someone urgently needs the catalogs, just let me know, and I'll make sure to commit them soon.

/Peter

Christian,
I have committed the latest translation work to xml catalog files in CVS now.

Regards

Peter

Malte,
German is fully translated on the translation server. I could imagine that Carl and the translation team in Heidelberg would be interested in comparing with your version. I would rather have one german translation in dotLRN than several unless the translations are systematically different such as one being formal and the other casual.

Writing a script to commit nightly is possible. I don't know if I'll get around to that though. I was hoping it would be sufficient to commit every other weeks.

/Peter

The german translation is not finished. What is up is just a rough draft. It is not yet absolutely clear how our translators in Heidelberg are going to contribute. Translating in an open forum is new for them and working on a moving target (source language in this case) has caused tension. Malte, unless you have decided to create a "casual" translation please use/improve on the german translation that is up on the Collaboraid translation server. We need to stick together on this. As soon as it is clear how and if the translators are going to contribute I will post the plan here.

thanks, Carl.

I've already got my first problem! due to problems with the login I got confused and thought that was a problem with my password, so I told the system to generate a new one for me (twice, about 1h ago) and none of the two mails reached my mbox yet -- so I could't even login.

I receive messages from other sites, like this one, so I suppose that is a problem with the translate site. it's not a big trouble, just want to let you know.. (maybe you could do smth to bring the mail system up again sooner) :)

sorry if this is not the right place to report these problems.

Poli,

You have been added to the translation group. With your help we are going to have one of the most diverse E-Learning platforms around! It is wonderful to see this kind of input into dotLRN (Asturian!).

Some words of caution for new translators:

1. The internationalization (i18n) project is presently paused (there is no active development right now because of other priorities... like dotLRN 1.0). As soon as dotLRN 1.0 (the English version) is officially out in March (if testing goes smoothly) we will be looking at ways to continue and finish the i18n work for the next version of dotLRN.

2. Does this mean you should wait on translating dotLRN? Maybe (although I know the really cool translator's interface makes it HARD not to translate now 😉. There will be changes in the original English version during testing and debugging of dotLRN 1.0 over the next couple of weeks, which might make waiting a month or two on translation the better choice.

3. Right now access control is rather simple (if you are signed up as a translator on the server you can "translate" everything). What does this mean? It is very easy to overwrite the work of others. A couple of weeks ago someone "translated" parts of the US English version into another language by mistake (at first we thought it was some really weird bug) and we recently discovered a whole section of the German translation was not really German (which wasn't as funny).

The point of this long-winded post: good luck and be careful.

Manuel and Poli,
I will try to add the austurian locale (ast_ES) later this week. The system currently only allows for two letter languages but this could fairly easily be changed. If you know the charset information for this language - let me know. This information is not critical though, I believe we can use the UTF-8 charset instead.

/Peter

Manuel,
thanks for the link with ISO language code, I've added it to the start page like you said. I've also added the Asturian locale to the translation server and changed OpenACS to allow for 3 character ISO 639-2 language codes. Feel free to start translating to Asturian now.

/Peter