Report from the October French (Quebec) Translators Meetup

Four of the fr_CA translators team met in Montreal yesterday to discuss how to communicate, prioritize and exchange tips and tricks on how to translate CiviCRM. We would also like to get in contact with other translation teams to know how they work. Here are some topics we discussed:

• We reviewed and adopted the French translation lexicon, since consistency is a big problem in the French translation. We are looking forward to feedback from translators in France and other French speaking countries, and we hope to have consensus as much as possible. We think our lexicon can be a good model for other translations and we would like your feedback on how to improve it.
• We plan to use the Francophone forum on forum.civicrm.org to communicate between team members for issues related to French terminology. We will use the internationalization forum for questions which may be related to the underlying mechanisms.
• We agreed for the need to translate the CiviCRM components names to French, so CiviMail becomes "Envois massifs" and CiviContribute becomes "Contributions", "CiviMembers" becomes "Adhésions", and so on. We found this made the interface much more natural to users and have received positive feedback about the tests.
• We adopted the Wikipedia conventions for typography, since Quebec and France use different typography, but we prefer to stay as close from the French one as possible, and found the Wikipedia conventions to be well written.

We also noted the need for better documentation on how Transifex works, the workflow for releasing new versions of the translation files, a need for reviewing the translations (QA) (how?), book & marketing translation, translation sprints, and many other topics we hope to move forward. If you would like to participate in the French or fr_CA translation, read the lexicon page and join us of the forums! See also other ways you can contribute to the CiviCRM project.

Comments

I created a new wiki page to aggregate all the documentation related to translation (for now, it is in the "develop" section)

And we now have a new blog category for i18n/l10n, so you can now browse the archives using that category.