Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
46 lines (28 loc) · 3.19 KB

translations.md

File metadata and controls

46 lines (28 loc) · 3.19 KB
Raw

Translations

The following natural languages are supported on bobby-tables.com:

We'd love to have translations into other languages as well. Please contact the bobby-tables mailing list and ask a team member about how you can help.

Contributing translations

  1. Run make messages.

  2. Skip this step if you just amend a translation. If you need to start a new language, copy share/locale/com.bobby-tables.pot to share/locale/xx_YY/LC_MESSAGES/com.bobby-tables.po, but substitute xx for the appropriate language code and YY for the territory code. (Alternatively to copying, use the command msginit.) Naming convention examples:

     sv_SE.po    standard Swedish
 pt_BR.po    Brazilian Portuguese

  3. Edit the PO file. Lokalize (formerly KBabel) is excellent, Poedit is good. Any text editor supporting UTF-8 can handle PO files, but it will not be as convenient.

  4. Run the normal make step.

Guidelines for translations

  • Become familiar with the source mark-up language Markdown used for producing the rendered HTML. The backtick (`) is an important piece of syntax pertaining to translation, it indicates code, e.g. a variable name, and code is not translated, i.e. copy the source text into the target language as-is. Indented paragraphs are also code. Translate only comments in such code blocks.

  • To find out where a piece of English is from to see the context, run ack -a 'source text goes here'. Most of the source text is in directory s/. Run make clean first to avoid duplicates in build files. (If you don't have ack you can use grep -R.

  • You can check your progress by running make l10n-status.

Apart from that, the normal rules for any translation apply:

  • Don't translate literally or word-by-word, instead capture the essence of each sentence/paragraph and reformulate it so it reads naturally. If you have to merge or rearrange sentence parts, do it.

  • Avoid keeping key words/technical jargon in English, consult the standard literature for existing translations of key words. (Software vendors such as Microsoft and KDE publish shared translation tables, import those into your PO editor, too.) In case you find no good translation, use your imagination and put yourself into the position of a member of your potential audience: is the sentence still understandable? If not, add a parenthetical remark to the key word.

  • It can happen that source text is wrong in some way (typos, factual errors). This should be improved first in a separate patch, independent from your translation. Fix it yourself, and if not possible (e.g. because the English text is ambiguous), use git annotate to find out who wrote it and ask for clarification.