I'm an aircraft engineer with quality background, I joined to Hungarian Society for Quality in 1990's during years I attended several events as participant, contributed to the our magazine, later on I give lectures on other events, I worked in committees, and February I was picked as CEO for this organization. When I was appointed reviewed the resources and our society inner works, in which I was not fully involved in past, found that it is not manageable for long time. In the same time I participated in open source activities such as OpenOffice Hungarian localization team and in OpenOffice Base as QA volunteer, which I keep until now. When I started looking around our IT system I see big problems, old hardware, the website is old and difficult to manage. The member records in spreadsheet files, the membership fees hardly followed. If one colleague left the society, we could face the hard time to organize, the next event. I started looking for viable solution for our problems, when I looked around, found that a CRM system can solve most of our daily problems. In Hungary not found any solution CRM system which are good for us, fully localization was a first need, because our colleagues not speaking any foreign language.
When I searched for CRM systems I found the CiviCRM, and logged into live demo site and selected the Hungarian localization option, found that only main menus was translated, and see some ugly words, but the all system looks promising solution to our problems. I selected the WordPress version, because I used it in OpenOffice localization, and I know it pretty well, from user perspective. Next I looked around for more information, in documentation, and wiki, I found the localization information. The main problems I faced was that I'm not a coder, for translation works I need a web-tool, earlier I used the pootle, later found the Transifex site where I looked the Hungarian translation project status, recognized that the translation started at least two times, but was stopped at 15% level, it was not enough to use it. Contacted the Hungarian transaltion coordinator, he said he has no longer time to work on the translation, but he can transfer the coordinator role, which I take. In the same time I posted on on hup.hu linux fan portal questions who knows the CiviCRM, no get any answer during one month period. I looked around in Transifex, how much time need from me to translate the CiviCRM fully. My though was it is lot of work. It was around November 2012. I started working on translation alone. I looked the numbers in March this year, the translation was on 23%, I spent lot of time and no viable results. When I realized this situation and feel me in trouble, posted message on hup.hu again in April this year, that I will restart translation process, and asked others to help me on this work, and announced a hard deadline - middle of this year. One volunteer come forward to help me, Attila Szabó, he has helped me through the time until we finished the translation, thank you Attila. The specific part of Drupal Zoltán Várady translated, others helped us with samller parts, .
This caused another problem to me how to keep translation consistent. When I started the translation only the15% was already translated, my dilemma was what to do this earlier translated texts, I decided not touch until I feel good enough in the CRM context. Another problems which I first faced was the meanings of the CRM terms in Hungarian, I not used any CRM system earlier. I forwarded for the web and searched for CRM solution providers webpage for any FAQs or glossaries. I looked into the Transifex own glossary, found some strange wordings, first corrected this one. When new translators arrive I directed them to the glossary, and we needs to keep translation consistent. Next thing was a translation style guide, we decided to use Drupal translation guidelines, it was logical solution because the CiviCRM close connection to Drupal. We was ready to faster work. I spent nearly on average 10 hours per week for translation, some week more some week less, depending my other tasks. We missed the planned finish date, we announced on 16th August 2013. the initial translation end. The initial 15% texts partially reviewed in the same time, corrected the most viable wrong wordings. We installed in February WordPress and CiviCRM latest version on our hosting provider server, and upgraded always to the latest version of CiviCRM, I used this to the feature exploration and for translation review.
If I found some mistranslated words, I went to the Transifex and corrected the wrong text and all connected or similar words as needed. I used Transifex built in tools for this, logged into, and went into that package which I think the translation belong, If I found in CiviPledge page some wrong word, I selected the “pledge” in the left side upper box selected “Translated text” and inserted the wrong word or expression, the Transifex listed all strings where these can be found, corrected all occurrences. It a little tricky and the selection is not easy, a small mouse move cause switch between the selections. See screenshot in attached picture.
Next I looked around other modules if this word or expression also could be appeared., corrected these too. If I changed such words which was in Transifex glossary corrected this, too. One big effort remains the review all strings, which is not urgent.
Now the one big effort remains, probably not connected to the translation work.Create user documentation, and provide training to our collegues, and finally Introduce the CiviCRM in our Society daily work.
The good thing that happened from August 2013. some civil organization started the CiviCRM project because it is fully translated.
I hope my experience could help other translators to organize their works.
