(This document is meant for translators who want to help bring Sonic Pi to their language. If you're contributing code to Sonic Pi, please read the primer to the Translation Workflow to learn about the inner workings of i18n in your code.)
Sonic Pi is designed to be usable by everyone including school students from 10 years old. It's therefore important to us that it is usable outside the English-speaking world. We are crowd-sourcing the translation effort so if you want to help people in your community to be able to play with it in your language, please consider joining the translation effort.
Luckily a number of fabulous contributors have already started to translate much of Sonic Pi to their language. However, we always appreciate help by those willing to proofread, spellcheck or update the existing translations. Every contribution - big or small is hugely appreciated.
Thanks to everybody involved!
As Sonic Pi development moves fast, there are always updates to the GUI (Graphical User Interface) and the tutorial. To help translators keep track of these changes, we use Weblate, an open-source web-based translation editor.
The nice thing about Weblate is that you don't need to be a developer to help translate Sonic Pi.
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The Sonic Pi Qt GUI is the application you use on your desktop screen. It contains few message strings and translating it is easy.
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The Tutorial is a long document. Translating it requires significantly more effort, but it's very rewarding as it is a step-by-step introduction for new users to Sonic Pi.
The tutorial is written in Github Markdown, which contains a few special control character sequences.
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(The Reference cannot be translated - yet. We're working on that.)
So if you want to...
- add a missing translation
- proofread an existing translation
- correct a mistake in a translation
- translate to a whole new language
...all you need to do is visit Sonic Pi on Weblate, sign up and follow the instructions there.
Weblate gives you a number of helpful tools, e.g. it spots common mistakes and you can keep a glossary of recurring terms that you can share with other translators.
We can't thank you enough for putting up with the inconvenience of translating Sonic Pi, but allow me to ask you for one more giant favour: If you want to help keep the translation up-to-date in the future, please consider subscribing to the Sonic Pi project on Weblate so that you will be informed of new or changed strings.
The original English text was written in a fun, friendly, open and informal style designed to be accessible to children and adults alike. We would invite you to attempt to adopt this style when working on translations to another language. For example, try to use simple language where possible - and where not, try and explain what the complicated/technical words mean.
If it helps, try to think of Sonic Pi as a friend - and adopt the language a friend might use when explaining things to you.
You cannot change the original English strings with Weblate. If you spot a mistake in the English texts, please file an issue or correct it with a pull request here on github. Thanks!