Free software translations for people who do not know English
Posted by Sayamindu 2 months ago
Whenever we work on a PO file, we usually translate from English to the translate language. However, recently at OLPC, we had some Aymara translators who did not know English, but were quite comfortable with Spanish. We had been receiving such requests for supporting the display of an intermediate language in our translation system for quite some time now, and it was also a prominent feature request for Pootle, the web based translation software that we use. I was feeling a bit bored with my usual work, and decided to see if I could do something.
The straight forward way of implementing the feature would be to add yet another user preference which would store the list of languages in which the user would want to see the translations, but that seemed to involve significant amount of coding, and I was too lazy to do that. After thinking for sometime, I decided to take a short cut which should help us quite nicely now. Pootle can optionally show it’s interface in a non-English language, and I thought I would take advantage of that. Within around an hour (which included figuring out some of the Pootle code and understanding jToolkit), I had a patch which produced this:
So, if you select your UI language as Spanish, along with the original msgid, you will also get the corresponding Spanish translation when you are translating a message. I think this should do for now - though the “proper way” is probably the right thing to implement at some point.
Interesting co-incidence. I was planning to ask you about this specifically for some time and kept on forgetting. This came up tangentially as part of the freed.in conclave and it is a quirk at a stretch to assume that l10n always occurs from en_US -> local language. Wanted some anecdotal evidence to the contrary.
We’ve got a similar feature in Launchpad to show translations in alternative languages.
From memory, the primary use case was for performing translations into similar languages (e.g. Catalan translators might want to see Spanish translations, Brazilian Portuguese translators might want to see Portuguese Portuguese translations or vice versa, etc).
I don’t see this patch in the pootle’s mailing list, have sent it? I’m waiting for this feature in Pootle for a long time now for Mexico translations, hope it will be avairable in the next preview or stable version.
I’m cleaning up the patch a bit (some issues surfaced after I deployed it in our production server). I’ll probably send it to the Pootle mailing list sometime later today.
Patch posted at http://bugs.wordforge.org/show_bug.cgi?id=209