Using Transifex

Latest revision as of 15:23, 20 August 2011

Go to https://meego.transifex.net/ and register. Once you have done that, select a language team to join. The lead for that team will then contact you and, if you agree on process for that language, you will be approved for that language team. If you don't see a team for your language, please consider starting it and being the lead, at least until you have critical mass.

Ideally, a language team should have a lead, at least 2 translators, and at least two editors/reviewers. It is essential that the same person that translates does not also review and approve their translation!

Once you've joined a language team, you can start translating! Transifex makes it easy for you to get the most up-to-date translation resource, translate, and post it back to the project.

Note: A few months ago, the MeeGo Transifex site was privately hosted at http://translate.moblin.org, but this site is no longer used. Please update your bookmarks to current site, https://meego.transifex.net/.

1. Once approved for a language team, choose a MeeGo release you would like to translate from the MeeGo Hub. The latest release will be labeled and will likely receive the most attention.
2. The next page displays a large list of translation statistics for all MeeGo language teams. Click on the language code for your team to see all of the resources available for translation.
3. If translation has already started for a particular resource, simply click on the resource name to continue translation, or revise existing translations.
4. If no translation exists yet for a particular resource, it will be listed at the bottom of the page. Follow the link for the desired resource to translate. Now you have landed on the resource page. Click "Add translation", choose your language from the dropdown menu, and click "Translate Online".
5. After you are finished translating, remember to click the "Save and Exit" button near the page bottom.
6. Now your translations are available for MeeGo developers to integrate into the distribution.

Note: If you are finished translating, be sure to unlock the translation so others on your team can work on it.

Note: Transifex lets you download translation resources so you can translate locally instead of through the web interface. For MeeGo Netbook UX PO files, we highly recommend using Poedit to translate them. For MeeGo UX TS files, the Qt Linguist tool is recommended. There are other applications that also get the job done. Lokalize is a KDE program that works on Linux and Windows. Virtaal is another great program. The biggest plus of these programs is the translation memory. You can load other translations, such as the Gnome translations, in the memory and the application suggests translations when a similar translation exists. This is handy for consistency. Some applications even contain interfaces to automatically query e.g. open-tran.eu or Google Translate.

Note: Transifex doesn't keep any 'fuzzy' strings. On import, Transifex will throw any fuzzy lines. If you need them, you have to store it yourself, outside Transifex.

Starting a Translation

For those of you familiar with PO Edit and editing po files, skip the next 3 steps.

1. Open the bisho.pot file in PO Edit. In the Settings dialog, be sure to put your email address in the file heading (under “Last-Translator”) so we know who did the work and you get the recognition for doing it! Also, please be sure that the Content-Type in the header is "UTF-8." Make sure to enter this in the plural field to avoid corruptions and losing your work when you save: nplurals=2; plural=n!=1;
2. Save the settings you just entered.
3. Notice that there is a English string and right below it is msgstr “”. Put your translation of the English string inside those quotes.
4. You can name your new PO whatever you like on your local drive, but it’s better to use the same name as the file in Transifex for easy identification when you want to upload it back.
5. Go back to meego.transifex.net and go to the Bisho project.
6. Scroll down until you see your language. (If it does not appear in the list, you will need to click "Add a New Translation." See below.)
7. Select the last icon in the row of icons next to your language (the icon has a pencil in it and the mouse-over says "Submit a translation for po/xxx.po.")
8. Use the “Browse” button to find your local file and select it.
9. Click Send. If all goes well, you will see a message at the top of the screen that the po file was added successfully. You will also see your file appear in the list with the percentage of translation.
10. If you have any problems, send the issue to the mailing list.

Add a New Translation

If you are adding a new language for the first time to a project, click Add a new translation. The information that appears is pretty self-explanatory, but it is important to remember the following:

• Use the “Browse” button to find your local po file and select it.
• Ignore the "Select the target file" drop-down list, and enter "po/<languagecode>.po" in the "or enter it here" box.
• Finally, add some message that details what you did.
• Click Send. if all goes well, you will see a message at the top of the screen that the po file was added successfully.