We’re striving to make it as easy as possible for people to help translate Songbird and we’d like to hear from the community about what works best for you. Some of the questions we have are:
- What features are most important to you in a web-based translation tool?
- Do you prefer translating online via a web interface or downloading files containing all the strings used by the application and editing them offline? If the latter, do you have a preferred file format and do you use any existing tools to manage offline translations?
Please add your feedback as comments on this blog post.
22 Comments
SubscribeI really prefer an online translation rather than a local software.
Also, a system like launchpad’s is perfect for software’s translation.
Welldone for the new skin : he really change the experience !
I’d still prefer translating online. Doing it offline is simply too much to manage because localization in XUL is done through DTDs and Properties. And I have a whole meeting room of localizers who would agree with me on that.
As for features that translate.songbirdnest.com should have, here are a few:
* Page jumping. I want to be able to jump to page twenty something without having to click four times.
* Shortcut keys. Hitting Tab should save the current string and move the focus into the next string for editing. Hitting Shift + Tab should save the current string and edit the previous.
* Searching. Search by string key, by English, or by translation.
* Context comments. Indicate how a string is used in its context. For example, in the title bar, on a button, in a tooltip, or in some dialog text in Preferences.
@kourge
We’re thinking about providing a .po file (http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/gettext/PO-Files.html) containing all of the strings and keys so people can use tools like Poedit (http://sourceforge.net/projects/poedit/). So far it sounds as though that’s not particularly useful.
The only thing I want for now is the translation of Songbird merged with the translation of Firefox/Xulrunner. Songbirds translation is far from complete now.
Localizing offline is more efficient, if you provide dtd and properties files: The translator can save the changes, reload the chrome and see how it does apply/if there is enough space for the string, if it has the same writing style like the strings next to it etc.
Speaking about my experience with people who translate extensions online, these translations have often less quality.
Well, I like to do it online, but than it should be without page refresh (with ajax), but I think this is already the case.
A nice thing would be to have a button in songbird: translator mode and than you can click on any word or sentence and translate it in songbird directly, which will lead to better translations. An example of something similar is if google translate. If you translate a web page, you can click on a sentence to suggest a better translation.
If the translation must be online, I think that would be necessary a engine to filter non-translated entries. Thank’s
So.. you are asking songbird localizers if they prefer current state of affairs?
Let me explain who (IMHO) current localizers are: they are group of volunteers who didn’t have a chance to create good songbird translation yet and were forced to use online system - either they don’t care or they like it, are they truly interested in changing it?
So.. you are expecting answer like keep rocking like earlier and only reason of this post is to justify the choice to keep forcing people to use bad system. It is not my choice or problem but I really think this is completely wrong.
Songbird is mozilla based app, mozilla l10n process is in general open to all tools (both online and offline ones) - why do you need to break that?
As far as I know, there are both sides of the “it’s better to translate online / offline” argument. I personally can see both the pros and cons for both translating online and offline.
But despite that Pootle (pootle.sf.net) is an online translation tool, it works internally with .po files, so it shouldn’t be hard to do stuff offline and sync it with Pootle.
Mozilla is also planning Verbatim, a branch of Pootle, which is modified to fit with the needs of Mozilla apps. I don’t know why Verbatim won’t fit with Songbird’s needs, but it’s written in Python and it shouldn’t be /that/ hard to port some Songbird-specific Ruby code (if that’s what’s used to generated XPI files) to Python.
@Daniël - I agree with reusing Firefox translations. It’s silly not to.
@Archaeopteryx - Yes, this was one of the issues I brought up when they announced Verbatim in one of the sessions at the Mozilla Summit. They were talking about how Verbatim can lower the entry barrier for translators; but making the entry barrier /too/ low would make it easy for people who know nothing about technical terminology to translate software, thereby lowering the translation quality.
I’m a Ubuntu user, and also an official Ubuntu Translator to Spanish. I think that Launchpad is a great and useful tool to make the translations… Launchpad can handle po files and online translation.
With Launchpad you can also search, see the remaining translations, see all the progress, etc.
About programs, i Like Poedit, so easy and powerful.. But I prefer online translations..
Why not both options?
Here’s the link to Songbird’s Project in Launchpad:
https://launchpad.net/songbird
If you want, you can request this project space officially.
Use Verbatim please: http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6626
You can translate online and offline with the tool you prefer.
More info + demos: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Verbatim
Hi, I’m member of the Proyect NAVE which translate some mozilla based programs into Spanish of Spain, such Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey, Sunbird…
We have not started to translate Songbird (and there is a horrible translation to es-ES) because your system. It doesn’t permit you to search and you need so search manually between 900 strings to see where is the english string, I agree with kourge, no more to say.
Maybe you can use launchpad or Pootle (Verbatim is the development mozilla pootle server), which is perfect for online translation. Please, take a look to Pootle!
Kind regards!
Pootle allows translating online and offline. You can download the translation file, translate offline with the desired tool, and upload your changes back (conflicts are marked as suggestions).
Pootle is PO-based (it supports XLIFF too), and with the Translate Toolkit you have different converters for translation file formats.
Pootle can also work with VCS’s (cvs, svn, git, hg, bazaar, …), so if you plan to provide a PO file from the repositories, you can link that with Pootle and let localizers use the way that better fits their needs.
I think the current tool is already great but it need more work.
I point Daniel comment :
“The only thing I want for now is the translation of Songbird merged with the translation of Firefox/Xulrunner. Songbirds translation is far from complete now.”
One other thing, it’s stupid to be notice everyday of a translation update.
This should be off.
I already translate using PO on launchpad and it’s great
For some other I use QTLinguist (local)
Btw, can anybody actually point me to where we can translate songbird? I can’t seem to find it on the site.
I have a proposal..
Please, cancel all this languages.. Many languages are close to be the same. I propose to support just a Language (for example Spanish (Neutral)) and drop all the spanish-co, spanish-es, spanish-ar, spanish-mx.. Etc..
Maybe like Ubuntu does (just one Spanish), or maybe like Mozilla does.. They only have ES-es and ES-ar, one for Spanish from Spain and another for Latinamerican Spanish, because these two have a lot of differences.
Darkhole, Mozilla only has es-ES and es-AR because nobody from other countries have localize it (in fact there is work in progress for es-MX and es-CL).
Note that “localize” is not just translate, it’s adapt a product to a specific group of people.
What about using BabelZilla ?
It has online and offline translation and take care of XUL specificities.
Thanks for the input, everyone. We’re well aware that our current translation process makes it unnecessarily difficult to localize Songbird and we’re building an entirely new tool to address this.
We’ve taken a close look at all of the web-based translation tools mentioned in this thread. Unfortunately, none of them would be easy to integrate with the way we package translations. Unlike most applications, we allow users to continue to update the translations for versions of Songbird which have already been released. This means we have to track what versions of Songbird each string is used in and generate and package language updates when any translation is updated. We also wanted to ensure that people could log into the application with their existing Songbird user account.
We understand that most translators don’t want to learn yet another translation tool and we’re trying to make our process similar to the direction that Mozilla is taking with Verbatim. For translators who prefer working offline, we plan on providing .po files which can we used in the editor of your choice.
Some other features include:
* Automatically importing the Firefox/XULRunner translations provided by Mozilla.
* The ability to preview a translation with a one click install of an XPI.
* Search on strings and keys.
Hi,
I think both options should be available. I am not keen on the current system. The best online translation system I have used is the one run by http://www.utorrent.com
Please take a look at their system and see how they use it. It is very easy to use.
Seanán
https://translations.launchpad.net/
The system Ubuntu uses for translations is excellent, it’s the only system that has gotten me into doing some translations for open source projects, simply because it’s so easy, friendly and most importantly; approachable. Don’t know if you can use it stand alone, since it’s part of launchpad, but just thought i’d contribute my 3 cents
@Seanán, @Stefan
Is there anything specific that you like about these tools?