[Localization] [Announce] Scratch translations

[Alexander Dupuy]

Evelyn Eastmond wrote:
> Our current .po files are here:
> http://scratch.wik.is/@api/deki/files/109/=locale.zip
>   

Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
> I have added a test project for Scratch[1] in Pootle. You can access
> the project from https://dev.laptop.org/translate/projects/scratch/
> Note that this is a test project, so at the moment there is no
> guarantee that the translations will actually go into the source tree.
>   

I recently spent a few hours translating the Scratch project on Pootle 
into Spanish, and then Portuguese.  I have few notes/experiences that 
I'd like to share with anybody else who is working on this in these or 
other languages.

1. A large number of the strings (nearly all of the untranslated ones in 
Spanish, when I first looked at it) are the names of musical 
instruments.  Finding translations of some fairly obscure musical 
instruments is quite difficult, and requires a lot of musical knowledge; 
however, I found Wikipedia to be a great resource for this.  Do a 
Wikipedia search for the particular instrument (e.g. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowbell) then just click on the languages 
links to similar pages in other languages.  This trick works quite well 
for a lot of different types of specialized terminology.

2. After a bit of this (with Google searching) I discovered that these 
instrument names were actually the General MIDI standard instruments and 
percussion, which have their own pages on Wikipedia 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Midi), and in some other places as 
well.  Having the complete list in English and finding versions of it 
for Portuguese and Spanish (the latter under the main MIDI page, rather 
than General MIDI) made this rather a lot easier, and even just knowing 
that these were MIDI instruments was extremely helpful.  This allowed me 
to complete the Spanish translation and a lot of the Portuguese as well 
(even though my Portuguese is not particularly strong).

3. Knowing that these were General MIDI strings also revealed a number 
of English strings that were definitely or at least probably incorrect.  
"Skakuhachi" is a typo for "Shakuhachi" and "Bright Acoustic" and 
"Honky-Tonk" should be "Bright Acoustic Piano" and "Honky-Tonk Piano" 
(much easier to translate, even without an already-translated list of 
General MIDI), and it seems quite likely that "Orchestral Strings" 
should actually be "Orchestral Harp."  (The piano names may have 
suffered from excessive string-splitting when trying to eliminate 
duplicate strings.)  The strings "SynthBrass 1" "SynthBrass 2" 
"SynthStrings 1" and "SynthStrings 2" should probably have a space after 
"Synth" (i.e. "Synth Brass 1").  Hopefully the Scratch developers can 
correct these; until then I made notes in the Spanish translation of the 
presumably correct English (and translated from that).

4. While Googling for some of the Portuguese instrument names to confirm 
translations, I stumbled upon the following search result (it's not the 
exact search I used; I didn't have the "filetype:po" restriction, but 
this is a useful trick): 
http://www.google.com/search?q=pandeirola+filetype%3Apo returns a link 
to a Portuguese translation for (a slightly older version of?) Scratch, 
apparently by one Cleber Tavares on 2007-12-28, who appears to have used 
the Wikipedia General MIDI instrument names.  Although from a slightly 
different version, this was far more complete than the translation in 
the Scratch zip file, or on Pootle.  Using this as a guide, I was able 
to get the Portuguese translation to over 80% (I wasn't sure how best to 
translate "sprite" and didn't think that Tavares' use of "objeto" was 
really what was wanted, so I left those untranslated for now).  I don't 
know if Tavares had informed any of the Sprite developers of his 
translation, but I think it demonstrates how having a centralized 
repository and tools like Pootle to coordinate the translation efforts 
can be helpful (I was just *very* lucky to find this with Google 
searches for some otherwise rare strings from the General MIDI 
instrument list in Portuguese).

@alex

-- 
mailto:alex.dupuy at mac.com