Second day of Localisation Sprint/Hackathon

Well, it's been done, we chose the translation platform: Transifex. We're fully aware that we did not actually choose a platform that fully supports the ideal situation, but such a platform does not exists. This is more the choice of a promising back-end which we hope we can eventually develop into the ideal situation. The interesting part in the discussion was finding a balance between the technical and functional interests. Programmers were not too keen on choosing a platform that would require big changes to the way strings are stored and manipulated. On the other hand translators would benefit from more intuitive user interface, giving immediate feedback on results and overall progress, such as being able to find the context in which a string is used. The Drupal localization client's "on-screen translator" offers this feature, but is unfortunately deeply linked to the Drupal translation tools. Perhaps it will one day be possible to develop such a tool, linked to Transifex system. The possibility of exporting ".mo files" is one feature offered by launchpad's Rosetta that none of the other systems have, which would have been really useful to users. Transifex offers some really interesting features compared to the current system:

• it's easy to put in place and make available to translator teams
• it will be easier to do off-line work (being able to download/upload files and locking files while doing major changes)
• different teams can be assigned to different languages, with different access control (each team can decide how they work) and moderation system
• we hope that being part of the Transifex community will encourage translators of other project to help translate CiviCRM to their language
• it's fast

These are the other main things that were discussed and done today:

• the database now keeps the currency of each transaction (the user interface is expected to make use of this in 3.3)
• the issues relating to auto-completion in Chinese (and other languages using an "input method editor") are close to being fixed
• translation coordination procedure and workflow have been discussed
• chai tea has been brewed and drunk

And finally, we were treated to a scrumptious dinner that no words can rightly describe but will be rightfully remembered for a very long time indeed.

Comments

Your link titled "technical and functional interests" has extra chars in. Should be this http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Translation+Evaluation+Matrix address.

Is there anyway to upload the original english po files? It would be a lot easier if people could just download the relevant files, add their translations, and then submit them? Especially if there's a big fat link that says "These are the files to translate, we recommend poedit (or localize, or whatever)"

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘the original English files’, but Transifex does allow you to download the POT files (translation templates)…