When translating tamtam, wiktionary, <a href="http://www.wiktionary.org/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://www.wiktionary.org/</a> , along with wikipedia, was very helpfull.<br>
<br>Eduardo<br><br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">2008/2/23, Alexander Dupuy <<a href="mailto:alex.dupuy@mac.com">alex.dupuy@mac.com</a>>:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Evelyn Eastmond wrote:<br> > Our current .po files are here:<br> > <a href="http://scratch.wik.is/@api/deki/files/109/=locale.zip">http://scratch.wik.is/@api/deki/files/109/=locale.zip</a><br> <br>><br> <br> Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:<br>
> I have added a test project for Scratch[1] in Pootle. You can access<br> > the project from <a href="https://dev.laptop.org/translate/projects/scratch/">https://dev.laptop.org/translate/projects/scratch/</a><br> <br>
> Note that this is a test project, so at the moment there is no<br> > guarantee that the translations will actually go into the source tree.<br> ><br> <br> <br>I recently spent a few hours translating the Scratch project on Pootle<br>
into Spanish, and then Portuguese. I have few notes/experiences that<br> I'd like to share with anybody else who is working on this in these or<br> other languages.<br> <br> 1. A large number of the strings (nearly all of the untranslated ones in<br>
Spanish, when I first looked at it) are the names of musical<br> instruments. Finding translations of some fairly obscure musical<br> instruments is quite difficult, and requires a lot of musical knowledge;<br> however, I found Wikipedia to be a great resource for this. Do a<br>
Wikipedia search for the particular instrument (e.g.<br> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowbell">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowbell</a>) then just click on the languages<br> links to similar pages in other languages. This trick works quite well<br>
for a lot of different types of specialized terminology.<br> <br> 2. After a bit of this (with Google searching) I discovered that these<br> instrument names were actually the General MIDI standard instruments and<br> percussion, which have their own pages on Wikipedia<br>
(<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Midi">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Midi</a>), and in some other places as<br> well. Having the complete list in English and finding versions of it<br> for Portuguese and Spanish (the latter under the main MIDI page, rather<br>
than General MIDI) made this rather a lot easier, and even just knowing<br> that these were MIDI instruments was extremely helpful. This allowed me<br> to complete the Spanish translation and a lot of the Portuguese as well<br>
(even though my Portuguese is not particularly strong).<br> <br> 3. Knowing that these were General MIDI strings also revealed a number<br> of English strings that were definitely or at least probably incorrect.<br> "Skakuhachi" is a typo for "Shakuhachi" and "Bright Acoustic" and<br>
"Honky-Tonk" should be "Bright Acoustic Piano" and "Honky-Tonk Piano"<br> (much easier to translate, even without an already-translated list of<br> General MIDI), and it seems quite likely that "Orchestral Strings"<br>
should actually be "Orchestral Harp." (The piano names may have<br> suffered from excessive string-splitting when trying to eliminate<br> duplicate strings.) The strings "SynthBrass 1" "SynthBrass 2"<br>
"SynthStrings 1" and "SynthStrings 2" should probably have a space after<br> "Synth" (i.e. "Synth Brass 1"). Hopefully the Scratch developers can<br> correct these; until then I made notes in the Spanish translation of the<br>
presumably correct English (and translated from that).<br> <br> 4. While Googling for some of the Portuguese instrument names to confirm<br> translations, I stumbled upon the following search result (it's not the<br>
exact search I used; I didn't have the "filetype:po" restriction, but<br> this is a useful trick):<br> <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=pandeirola+filetype%3Apo">http://www.google.com/search?q=pandeirola+filetype%3Apo</a> returns a link<br>
to a Portuguese translation for (a slightly older version of?) Scratch,<br> apparently by one Cleber Tavares on 2007-12-28, who appears to have used<br> the Wikipedia General MIDI instrument names. Although from a slightly<br>
different version, this was far more complete than the translation in<br> the Scratch zip file, or on Pootle. Using this as a guide, I was able<br> to get the Portuguese translation to over 80% (I wasn't sure how best to<br>
translate "sprite" and didn't think that Tavares' use of "objeto" was<br> really what was wanted, so I left those untranslated for now). I don't<br> know if Tavares had informed any of the Sprite developers of his<br>
translation, but I think it demonstrates how having a centralized<br> repository and tools like Pootle to coordinate the translation efforts<br> can be helpful (I was just *very* lucky to find this with Google<br> searches for some otherwise rare strings from the General MIDI<br>
instrument list in Portuguese).<br> <br> @alex<br> <br><br> --<br> mailto:<a href="mailto:alex.dupuy@mac.com">alex.dupuy@mac.com</a><br> <br><br> _______________________________________________<br> Localization mailing list<br>
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