Contribute to GNOME as a translator
Posted by Adi | Filed under English, Planet GNOME, Planet Ubuntu
This post tries to helps you to change your status of GNOME user to GNOME translator. Before or after reading this post you may also check my other post called Enjoy collabaration in GNOME translations.
Most probably you are using GNOME within your favorite distribution. This is what is called downstream, because the distribution’s developers are taking GNOME software from the GNOME source project (also called upstream) and compile and provided an usable software, downstream, on your computer.
To become a GNOME translator, all you have to do is to create an account on l10n.gnome.org, join the translation team for your language, check the translation status for your language and choose to work on some program with untranslated texts. To find more about l10n.gnome.org check my other post: Enjoy collabaration in GNOME translations.
Step by step guide… with images
The place to start is your team’s main page. There you will see a list of “Releases” together with the stats for each one. From that list you can ignore stable, old-stable and non-gnome “releases”. There are no longer under development by the GNOME team and the translation focus is set on the development , GNOME Office, GNOME infrastructure, Extra GNOME and GNOME fifth toe.
For each release you could choose weather to translate the application user interface or the documentation. I recommend to start with the user interface and when it’s done continue with the documentation.
Here is the Romanian team view and there should be a similar view for your language.
Let’s chose to translate the user interface for GNOME development. You will see a list of applications and the status for each one.
There is the percentage of translated string and in brackets you will see the number of translated string, the number o fuzzy strings, and the number of untranslated string, in this order.
Fuzzy strings are text that were translated in some older version of that applications but their initial text was changed or moved and to prevent the lost of the initial translation the translated text is matched (somewhat) fuzzy to a new string.
Here is the view for some of the GNOME Dev packages:
Beside the translation percentage you will also see the status for each package.
No status - If there is no status text, this means the package is waiting for you to be translated or to improve the translations of an already translated text.
Translating - If the status is “translating”, then someone has express the interest in translating this application and has reserved the application in order to avoid multiple people working on the same translations in the same time. You could also see since when the translations was marked as “reserved” and if the translator is inactive for some time you could post a comment and ask if he/she is willing the “free” the translation and let you do the translations.
Translated - This means the translator has finish the translations and now the translated text is waiting to be review and committed.
To review - This means the translator has requested that someone else should check he’s/she’s translation.
Proofreading - This status denotes the fact that a translations was done by one of the translators and now it’s being review by someone from the team.
To commit - This means the reviewer has checked and corrected the translations and now it’s ready to commit and make it available to all users
Translators workflow
As a translator you will look for “free” translations, reserve an application for translations and then submit the translation. You can also add comment to all other applications.
For each action you can add a comment and upload a file. For each uploaded file you can see the difference from the current translation.
Each member of the team could add comments and perform various task, according to their role in the team. Below is the action history for an application. In the beginning there were some comments, then the translation was reserved for translations, after that the translations was submitted and now it’s reserved for review.
The actual work…also with images
Let’s assume we want to translate “Seahorse”. We will find it in GNOME Development and then we will reserve it for translation and leave a message. It should look like this:
After that we will download the translations file and this is the most important part.
From the “Seahorse” translations page we will download the translation file. It is a “.po” or “.pot” and I have made a red hand made circle around the link.
If there was no previous translation for this application you will download a POT file (PO template) and you will have to change it and create a PO file, as you will translate in a PO file. Rename the file extension to .po and ask other translators to help you with setting up an initial po file.
If there was a previous translations for this application you will download a PO files, as someone else has already created this PO file from a POT.
Open the PO file using a text editor or a dedicated PO file editor. I will use PoEdit. Translate the file, save it and the upload the file back on the GNOME translation website. That’s all. This is the main window from PoEdit:
Also before starting the translations work please check the teams website and make sure you read the translations guide for your team.
That’s all. I tried to keep it as short as possible. If something is not clear please ask and I will try to explain better.
March 3rd, 2009 at 00:49
Thank you for taking the time to explain this, Adi. I am not a translator (only speak a small amounts of non-English languages), but this looks very helpful. I hope this encourages more people to translate the documentation.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:49
Really interesting to learn that Gnome as such tool, quite sexy.
I understood that this tool does not offer online translation. Translations must be made off-line, with a PO editor. Am I right?
March 4th, 2009 at 23:16
[...] Contribute to GNOME as a translator [...]
March 4th, 2009 at 23:39
@Guyou Have you even read the article?
March 16th, 2009 at 15:14
Hi,
as far as I’ve understood, there is an hierarchical structure in the translation teams and each contribution needs to be approved by someone. I was wondering who performs the commit to the repository once a contribution has been approved. It’s the user who wrote the translation or the commit goes under the name of the reviewer?
Thanks
March 16th, 2009 at 16:20
It is hard to track who is the translator of a phrase or a word.
All translators should be listed in the header or a PO file as copyrighter for the file and also in the “translators-credit” string to be shown in the About dialog.
In PO file there is a files “Last-Translators” and it is updated to the last person modifying the file.
I would not say that there is a hirarchical structure in a GNOME translation team.
There are translators which are doing a great job and their work could go directly into GNOME SVN and there is no need for review. Other translators, escepcialy the ones starting to translate, are making some errors and in order to assure quality