AnneW's world

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”’TheRiLi – ????? ?????? ??????”’
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If your browser doesn’t display the Arabic, or you simply don’t read Arabic, Google tells me that this says:
‘Are you a translator or do you understand the other languages”’

”’Provide Content for the Arabs and take in the races that”’
”’Arabic content increase in the richness of your language of love and peace”’
”’Be gentleman and in the evening and provided us with these pages”’
”’TheRiLi – Arab Society for Linux”’
”’Will be back later”’

Early in 2009 someone translated some pages of UserBase into Arabic. Unfortunately (s)he did so as an unregistered user (which we no longer allow) and so we have no way of contacting him (the main reason for disallowing the practice). To my untutored eye, much of what is there is probably still valid, but there are updates and corrections needed. I’m reluctant to lose this work, which could easily be copied and pasted into the new Translate system, but it really needs someone capable of spotting the things that are no longer quite right and correcting them.

If you know someone who may be willing to help it could either be directly translating into UserBase (and I will provide links to the old pages) or by telling me to delete paragraph “da-di-dah” and substitute “da-di-dah-di-dah”. There are always ways and means – we just need a little skilled help

If you speak Ukranian or Danish, excellently.  If you speak Chinese or Italian, quite a lot of pages.  Brazilian Portuguese, German and Spanish are beginning to make real progress.  If none of those are your language, there are very few pages translated.  To see how your language is faring, go to the Language Statistics page and enter your ISO_639-2 code

We now have 79 members registered to translate on UserBase, though only a fraction of that number is working regularly on translations.  For the top group, though, the figures are staggering.  In the last week for instance:

• Yurchor has touched 788 pages, making 1455 changes
• MarcusGama has touched 768 pages, with 1416 changes
• Claus_chr has touched 764 pages with 1454 pages!

Not everyone can manage so much time and speed, but that doesn’t stop some people.  These people have also been very active

• Qiii2006 made 402 changes
• Caig made 425
• Sordon made 123 and
• Nilli made 132.

while others have made fewer but equally valued contributions. This is the translation activity for the last 21 days:

Maybe you have an hour or two with nothing pressing to do?  You can easily get started.  There’s plenty of help available in our Tasks and Tools page.

By now we have completed the transfer of most existing translated pages to the new system, but there are a few glitches.  Where we don’t have a registered translator for a language, the only options are to lose the translation or to copy and paste it into the new sections.  For some languages that’s a feasible option – you only need to know enough to recognise whether a paragraph is matching the English one in content, but what if the language is a non-latin-character one?  I met one such this week.  One page has only a single translation in the old system, but that translation is Arabic.  I know by the structure that it matches most of what’s on the English page, but I’m sure that some bits are missing.  I really need help from someone who can sort that out for me.  It’s not a long page and I’d guess that someone with the right skills could do the whole thing in less than half an hour.

Other skills are needed too – php, css, database-query to name a few.  We have people with all these skills, but too small a team puts too much pressure on a few people.  What is really needed is a group for each task, maybe three or four, so that no-one is being pressured when he has other things to do.  If you can help, please come to Freenode’s #kde-www and talk to us.  You’ll get a warm welcome, I guarantee

If so, UserBase needs you.  What we need is not so much geek as bulldog determination.  For our wikis to be really useful in the long run they need to keep to guidelines that will enable them to be used with translation tools – both for localization and for translation to docbook.  Working with our translators we have produced a short guide to which all pages should, in time, adhere.  Since we have so many pages I propose that we tackle small groups at a time, editing them thoroughly, so that they can be marked for translation.  You will find the first four groups on the Translation Workflow page.

If you have a little time to spare while waiting for your application to build, we could really use it – we are looking for long-term benefit.

By the way –

There has been a remarkably fast take-up of the new system, as shown by this graph:

Inevitably we have met a few glitches.  The developers have already fixed a few problems for us, but some of the problems need an awareness when preparing pages for translation.  For the moment we would ask you to read http://userbase.kde.org/Translation_Workflow regularly, to see if new points have been added, and to follow the discussions of other issues on the associated Discussion page.

Soon we will distill the feedback into a Best Practices page, similar to our guidance on PageLayout.  With rapid feedback from translators and the extension developers this should be available in just a few days.

To get a translator account, please email me with your UserBase username, and mention the language(s) you will be using.

Just a reminder – if you are going to trans late in UserBase you need to

• request addition to the Translator group
• when you have confirmation, open the page Special:LanguageStats/your-country-code to see which pages need your attention
• Please don’t use the redlinks in the old language bar – those pages will be lost when migration is complete.
• Those in the Translation group should be able to see “Translate this Page” on any page that has been prepared.  That link takes you to the page where you choose your language.

After almost a year of planning we now have the TranslateWiki facility on UserBase!  What difference does that make?  A lot!  For a start, it means a completely new way of working, if you’ve been one of our faithful on-line translators.  It takes a little getting used to, but it has big advantages for the future, and will, in the long run, save you a lot of work.  To explain how, I need to tell you something about its capabilities first.

Producing a Manual

Off-Line Translations

How Does it Work?

Migration