Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

Well again, you'll be able to just login to SVN and do it yourself that way using whatever tools you want. Transifex isn't going to stop you from doing that, so us using and implementing it isn't going to change anything for you since it's just mainly a frontend for the various code repositories (SVN, CVS, etc...) that gives us tools to better manage it.

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

We really agree on this point

I'm sure that the two options will remains.

And I'm also convinced that it is really a good advantage to have a web tool to attract more people to translate.

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

Actually if the plans go ahead, Harmattan translators will be encouraged to translate or at least test the translations in an IDE where they can see the strings in their emulated graphical context.

String sizes are much more critical in a mobile UI than in a desktop UI.

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

Excellent. I've dealt with too many translators that think it's okay to make strings as long as they want. Having an emulated GUI to look at as they work is going to do wonders for Maemo. Great job, guys.

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

That's really something great.
Not only about UI size consideration, but also about context.
When you localise something (from text or simple tool) you don't always know where the translated string will appear in the UI, and what are the related strings.
This is really disturbing in .po file for example.

Not speaking about developpers who don't know that the English language can explain the same meaning in few and smaller words than other language :)

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

Believe me, I know. After 15 mobile games translated into 18 different languages, I know.

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

Yup! I'll be attending the Maemo Summit, and will be having a talk/BoF on Localization. I believe it'd be a great chance to talk all things L10n and kick-off a roadmap. I'm super-psyched and looking forward to ship Harmattan in 3x more languages.

What we're looking for, actually, are 4 or 5 compatible ways to submit translations:

- Ordinary VCS commit
- Upload a PO file through the web interface
- Edit the file online through the web-based editor
- Edit the translations through the IDE
- Submit a file through a command-line interface

Peer review can take place through the online editor. This can improve the content quality a lot.

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

Just one question, why use .po files ?
There are very good alternatives.

(did I say before that I hate translating .po files ?)

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

Oh, it's quite trivial to support more formats (such as XLIFF). Tx has a pluggable i18n backend system to support a number of files. As long as we can calculate translation completion statistics from them!

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

great news !

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

You can also look at future specifications that peharps will be used in the mozilla l10n process :

https://wiki.mozilla.org/l20n

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

Seems that it's time to start playing with a Maemo Transifex....

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=353318

How to start? After the good experience with http://maemo.gitorious.org and after chatting with Dimitris in the Summit I believe that we should go for a service hosted at http://www.transifex.net/

Just like with gitorious.org, you "loose" single sign-on but you win a current community around you and tools that are greatly maintained by their owners no less.

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing but didn't think that translating two strings in two packages was worthy enough to ask for something that major to start up. ;)

Indeed, it's time to make this happen. What's also interesting to me in that thread is how new and how few posts the people that made the translations have. New members of the community that want to make an impact and help out right away. Great stuff.

Let me know what I can do... even if it's just being a guinea pig for testing out Transifex.

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

Last weekend I thought I´ll register Conboy with transifex.net. After creating an account I was looking for the "register project" button, but I couldn´t find anything like that. Later it turned out that you have to send an email to the admins, etc. As it was totally unclear what will happen after that and how the future administration of the project will work, I turned away and cleaned up the .po files manually in SVN.

Probably I just missed something on the website, but I was not really in the mood to spend too much time on that....

To make it short, I would offer Conboy as a test project for evaluating transifex. There are currently translations into 7 languages + the new version introduces a couple of new strings and should be released soon. So I think it would be a good candidate for doing some testing.

Is this useful? How can we coordinate that? I saw that they have 'collections' which are currently Django, Gnome and LXDE. Should we have a Maemo collection there? Should I just try to register Conboy or do we want a more coordinated approach?

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

I just skimmed the posts really quickly so forgive me if I'm missing something obvious, but here's an idea.

It looks to me like transifex and pootle are options. Maybe take a project in need of translation, throw up two completely temporary instances of transifex and pootle, and get people willing to carry out translations to try doing it in both and then have them tell us what they think.

So if you got 3 people willing to try doing a bit (partial) translation twice we could get a hands on account of which tool is preferable.

You wouldn't even need to go look for temporary hosting for these trials. I could host a temporary pootle and someone wit ability to host django/python could throw up a transifex instance.

Disadvantage is it might take a week or two more to decide but we'd be better informed I think.

Also, if this sounds like a good idea it would be preferable for the test translators to be long-standing maemo contributors as they would be better able to spot what - in daily use- pootle and transifex do or require that works or doesn't work with the rest of the systems that support the maemo community (i.e. the intricacies of midgard or bugzilla, etc.)

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

Hi JosefA, we already decided to go for Transifex and imho now it's time to move forward rather than going backwards.

conny & zerojay, why don't you open the way as test community projects? In the meantime I will try to get out the documentation related to localization in Harmattan so we can start getting into implementation details for the official releases.

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

Ok, I just did sent them an email with the needed information for Conboy. Let´s see what happens next.

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

Fair. :) django is a nice web systems base anyhow. I'll try to make some time for Danish and Arabic l10n.

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

If you need help for french translations let me now...

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

Conboy is now added to transifex.net. You can find it here:
http://www.transifex.net/projects/p/conboy/

The problem is, that transifex.net currently does not support svn over https, only svn over ssh. Svn over ssh is (AFAIK) not available on garage.

The transifex.net staff told me that svn/https should be available soon.

So I guess we just have to wait a bit...

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

I can help with any kind of Turkish translation as well.

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

That would be cool! So now your officially part of the transifex.net evaluation :)

Could you please do the following:
1) Get an account at http://transifex.net
2) Send me your user name there, then I'll add you to the Conboy project
3) Go here: http://www.transifex.net/projects/p/conboy/c/0_5_x/ and try to create a translation.
4) Tell us what you think about it.

That would be really nice!

Because of technical reasons mentioned earlier the translation will not instantly get updated, instead I'll get an email with the new translation and I have to manually process it.


Of course anyone how wants to help out can do the same. There are only few, short strings in this project. I think you shoudn't need more than 15 minutes.

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

To create more visibility I've created a new thread which is about evaluating transifex.net using Conboy.
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=356633

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

conny, is it too early for us to begin drawing an assessment of transifex? You as the project admin and us as translators.

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

I don't think it's too early, I just don't have much time right now, so I was thinking to do my conclusion on the weekend. But if you want to start, please go ahead and just do it :)

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

There is a list of localization packages that are public in Maemo 5:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Objective:Comm...zation#Maemo_5

Maybe some of these are already available through the SDK release, I haven't checked myself.

It would be good to know what is missing and valuable for the community, sorted by relevance. This way we will know much better the steps to be done.

It would be also good to start playing with these files in Transifex, being useful to the teams willing to improve maemo support in their language.

And all this will be good learning, training and fine tuning for Harmattan.

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

fwiw in order to plan future steps:

About Harmattan, the localizations files use Qt's .ts format:
http://qt.nokia.com/doc/4.6-snapshot...le-format.html

For community L10n Qt Linguist should already work fine.
http://qt.nokia.com/doc/4.6-snapshot...st-manual.html

http://wiki.maemo.org/Objective:Comm...zation#Maemo_6

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

Dimitris from transifex.net gave great feedback to our small evaluation here.
For now I think my job in done. The question is: Where do we go from here?

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

To Barcelona? http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo-Barcelon...ocalization.3F

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

gPodder is now using Transifex.net and it's working out fine so far.

http://www.transifex.net/projects/p/gpodder/

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

Is it possible now to help translating projects for Turkish or do we have to wait more?

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

I don't see why not :) - but i would assume a post on the actual garage pages offering assistance would also be useful :) - especially if you are interested in translating certain apps? :)

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

I'll get my phone on Dec 12, but I want to be ready =) I'm interested in main UI -I think its about Hildon-.

Where's garage pages? (is it something like Launchpad/Rosetta?) :)

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

I´m just reposting an email from Nikos Korkakakis here:
The collection is now knows as maemo-extras. Have a look here:
https://transifex.net/collections/c/maemo-extras

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

I looked at transifex yesterday and - while i was there - provided a missing translation... it's so easy to do good. ;)

One question for the transifex experts here, though:

Could the infrastructure there be used to provide package maintainers with translation for the "description" field in their debian/control files?

The way i understood transifex, it works on a "one file provides one language"-basis, whereas the package descriptions are all thrown together in one file and I don't see how transifex would tell which languages are missing/complete within this file.

Having package descriptions translated is a fetish of mine, I can't help it. So when I tried transifex yesterday I thought it would be cool if this aspect of translation could be covered, too, so we'd have all in one.... Just didn't find how it would fit the system.

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

I don't want to give a translator access to my packages' debian/control. One solution could be a standard recipe (maybe even a dh_...) which took translations from the .po files and put them into debian/control at build time?

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

Does anybody know about a similar service that supports Qt-translation files (*.ts)?

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

I tried, but I failed :( http://maemo.org/community/maemo-dev...using-po_file/

I would love to have this! My work around for now is to put the description string into the po file and when I´m doing a release, I´m manually copying it to the control file. Not nice, but better then nothing. At least the interface for the translator stays the same.

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

AFAIK it´s on the TODO list for transifex.net. Not sure when it will be released, though.

Re: Community translations of Maemo software
 

Oh... well... yes. ;)

You lost me at "dh_..." - my Debian packaging skills are defined by Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V

Anyway, I just wanted to throw in the question/idea... right now, the workflow is: See package without description in your language in HAM ==> file bug or send mail to maintainer ==> wait.
That's not too difficult.

Anything provided by transifex should be about as simple (for the package maintainer, that is), plus it should provide

• the ability to search the collection for untranslated package descriptions (which you might not see if you don't have -texting/-devel enabled)
• the ability to search the collection for untranslated package descriptions for languages other than the one you use on your N900
• a more straightforward and controlled way of submitting translations