Sun, 25 Jul 2004

Mozilla translations - the translator POV

Chris Blizzard posted about Mozilla translation management. While I haven't been involved directly in Catalan translations of Mozilla, I maintain a few Debian packages of Mozilla translations to Basque and Catalan, and know now painful it can get to translate a Mozilla product.

The biggest problem, to the eyes of a translator completely used to gettext, is that Mozilla uses its own native i18n/l10n system and that's a very immediate barrier, as Chris points out. I think it would be very beneficial if Mozilla created an "official" bridge from their native formats to the PO format, which was integrated in the Mozilla build setup. Mozilla could distribute the POT file of their releases (alpha, beta, rcX), which translators could pick up, translate using well-known tools, and submit back to bugzilla. The po files would be integrated in upstream CVS, and could be available for the final releases. This would probably mean enforcing a string freeze of some kind in the final stage of the release process, so translations for rc2 would still be complete in the final version, like GNOME does already.

Right now, the Translate project is on the lead providing a suite of scripts that convert from mozilla to po and viceversa, but the process is still annoying enough and error prone to scare non-technical translators away. If Mozilla could take this and integrate it in their trees so that translators just need to care about translating the messages, and not about creating XPI files and so, I'm sure the translating effort would improve a lot in the mozilla world. MozillaTranslator is just not good enough anymore.

There are other minor problems, like some Mozilla dialogs having an apparent fixed size. For example, the account creation helper in the Catalan version of Thunderbird just shows half of the "Cancel" and "Ok" buttons, probably because the Catalan text is one or two lines longer than the original, and the dialog doesn't resize to fit correctly or so; you get a scrollbar instead. In other cases, like the About dialog, you don't even get a scrollbar. In some cases, the translator can define the size of the dialog, but this is just another problem in the translation process. GTK apps, for example, do resize and wrap text as needed. I don't know much about XUL, so I'm probably saying nonsense here.

19:07 | [] | # | (comments: 5)

I never understood the need for translation. I am Greek and greek is my first language. However, I just can't use a greek keyboard or write fast enough in greek with a computer.

When I was studying 'software analysis' in Greece in 1993, our Compaq machines were not localized, so I got used to typing fast in english and to see all the menus and stuff in english.

When Win9x came out and everyone was using the greek translation of Windows, I just could not use it. In fact, there are some computer words that they don't have greek equivelents and so the translators were "making them up" (e.g. for the word "Internet" they would call it "Diadyktio" or for the word "web browser"). I just found these words so silly, that each time I convert my PCs momentarily to Greek for my brother, I wanna puke.

Don't get me wrong, I love the greek language (it is juicely complex ;). I just don't think that it goes well with computer etymologies...

Posted by Eugenia at Sun Jul 25 20:17:19 2004

Well, I'm mostly into l10n stuff because it's my way of promoting the culture in my region, and make it survive the new technological era. If Catalan doesn't make into software, mobile phones, etc., it is a huge loss that would only favour the progressive "spanishisation" of our territory.

The language is mostly the core of a culture. If you lose your language, you're left without anything.

If greek translations are bad, that's the problem, not the fact that programs are translated. Of course, it may be just you, who prefer programs in their original form. I have Catalan friends that even if they have no fundamental problem with translated programs, they still prefer seeing stuff in English. Their choice, of course.

I personally enjoy seeing stuff in Catalan in my computer. I think it's a very important effort.

Posted by Jordi at Sun Jul 25 21:44:59 2004

>If greek translations are bad, that's the >problem, not the fact that programs are >translated.

No, the greek translations are NOT bad. They are just silly. They are make-up names for words that don't normally exist in the greek vocabulary. If I was to translate something, I would probably pick the same names too. It's just that they don't sound right. I do like the original english words better.

Posted by Eugenia at Mon Jul 26 02:15:43 2004

I can not agree with you two. Here in Brazil we try to translate most of our software but some words can not be translated.
Thanks for the good sense of our translators do not translate some english idiot words tha would seem to much worst in portuguese to brazilian than it is cool in english.
Of course, if you have a word in another language that no body ever heard (because it is just a neologism in the another language) for your language it will look just cool.
Can't see what i am talking about? OK. Think with me; what means 'internet'? Yes, it means 'internal network'. For ending, is Internet a Internal Network acctualy?
No, it is not.
So, in Brazil 'internet' is knwon as 'internet'. This goes to lots of other words that computer related words brought to us.
Of course we have be carefull with our language, its our culture we are talking about, every time a non portuguese word appears in a program help it appears with commas (if it get good translators) showing a non-portuguese word, what we here call an 'extrangerism'.
Do not get dumb, loosing your language/culture. Also, do not be a xenofobic, radical, xeno-killer.

Posted by Tiago at Mon Jul 26 23:50:25 2004

hello,
I need to translate from French to English.

Posted by raphael at Thu Feb 3 16:28:43 2005