From Mandriva

Coordinator: Pablo Saratxaga

Localization of the Mandriva Linux tools is essential for wide acceptance of Linux on the desktop. However it goes beyond translating messages word-for-word. You will want to stay as consistent as possible with the translations for GNOME, KDE, GNU etc. Also there may be style guides available for translating computer texts into your language.

• Mandriva Club Knowledge Base and news articles translation. Dynamically updatable. Open to Mandriva club members only. To become a club member, have a look at the Mandriva Linux Users Club Page.
• Mandriva Cooker wiki translations. Register a bugzilla account and read this section to have more information.
• Mandriva tools translations. Maintained by Pablo Saratxaga (pablo at mandriva .com). You have to use SVN to translate : see http://wiki.mandriva.com/Development/Howto/Subversion#Subversion_for_translators.
• Mandriva Community newsletter translations. Maintained by Adam Williamson (awilliamson at mandriva .com)
• Mandriva docs translations. Borges knowledge required. See http://www1.mandrivalinux.com/documentation/project/
  • If you want to translate documentation via PO rather than XML, please check How to Translate Documentation.
• Mandriva main website translations. See Web translation effort. Maintained by Celine Harrand (celine.harrand at mandriva dot com)

To contact translators for your language click on one of the following links:

• Translators
• Translation teams (not up-to-date)

To subscribe to the cooker-i18n mailing list, look here: http://mandrivalinux.com/l10n/index.php3

To extract in a single place all the directories containing translatable files, use the po virtual module in the cvs. See http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/CvsHowto for details on how to access the cvs repository.

Translation Team Pages

• de:Development/Tasks/Translating - german translation team page
• fr:Development/Tasks/Translating - french translation team page
• fr:Maison - french translation Wiki Cooker
• nb:Development/Tasks/Translating - Norwegian Bokmål translation team page
• es:Development/Tasks/Translating - spanish translation team page
• es:Home - Spanish translation Wiki Cooker
• TranslationInEstonian - estonian translation team page

Ideas for improvement for translation project

• provide some communication infrastructure
  • a list for i18n for each language to discuss and coordinate translation
    • will be provided in future (as i have understood it -- Steffen Barszus - 07 May 2004 )
  • maybe a page for each language, there translation guidelines and notes can be stored ?
    • a wiki page will be used for this, see above

Reason: Its hard to work and organize w/o organisation or feedback, it would be preferable to have one list for each language. People could exchange each other in their native language. The normal i18n list should be held as well.

• provide some development framework
  • a cvs for translation only should not be that hard. Cooperative work can be done with it a lot easier then the top-down approach, further the current top-down approach doesn't work in free software, changes can be easily synced between drak*tools CVS and i18n CVS Reason:' Currently, there is a top down approach used. People get there work and give it back to the language maintainer, That one gives it AFAI understood to Pablo or checks it in CVS or something like that. (Not sure How it should work). The problem is that translation is a free software project too and it just doesn't work, people can become unresponsive ..... With CVS a lot of typical problems could be solved, which we currently have.
    • is this comment still valid? (there is a specific "po" module on CVS for only po and pot files) [Pablo Saratxaga]
• have a defined workflow
  • Ready translations are send to language maintainer or Pablo, or one has write access to cvs and transmits it. So it goes direct in po Module in Mandriva CVS. Things that are checked in there, are in the next package that is build.

Reason: The above way could open a door for not so experienced translators too, or some workflow, for testing translations, re-read translations by other persons and so on and so forth. I just can speak for the german translation team, that was nearby non existant some months ago. We (the german translation team) are trying to use an external CVS now and one person who sends translations to Pablo to get both in sync.

• Proofread the strings before sending them to the translators
  • *.pot files are available via http://www.mandrivalinux.com/l10n/pot.php3 . Now we would need some english natives that have fun to proofread strings and could provide diffs Pablo on the cooker-i18n-list: "proofreading them and sending diffs (diff old.pot new.pot > file.diff) to me would be indeed very helpful (send diffs of the pot files, it is much easier for us to find the place where to fix it that just telling the wrong string and how to replace it)"

Reason: As a translator I spend way too much time posting incredibly stupid language errors to cooker-i18n. I want to spend my time translating, not correcting strings from developers who never paid attention during english lessons. And when the errors are fixed the messages are marked fuzzy so that we have to go over it again!

Wikipedia

If you are a translator you might as well want to check whether the Mandriva item in your local Wikipedia is up to date. See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandriva_Linux