[Localization] [Announce] Scratch translations

[Eduardo H Silva]

When translating tamtam, wiktionary, http://www.wiktionary.org/ , along with
wikipedia, was very helpfull.

Eduardo


2008/2/23, Alexander Dupuy <alex.dupuy at mac.com>:
>
> 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
>
>
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