[Server-devel] Translating Moodle - a sustainable approach...?

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 3:02 AM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 8:21 PM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com> wrote:
>> One of the issues I see here is the relative difficulty in pushing
>> translator upstream. I won't be a problem for active languages like
>> Spanish, Turkish, etc, but for languages like Pashto, etc, which have
>> very few people translating, are even lesser number of people with
>> proper (if any) internet access, it is going to be a problem. However,
>> as you say, it might be actually _worth_ the effort :-).
>
> Well, we will need fairly good coverage of moodle in the translation.
> If we end up translating 70% of moodle strings to Pashto, it would
> make sense to share them upstream and try to get a Moodle Pashto thing
> going (with translators from the wider moodle community) so that the
> translation team is self-sustaining on the Moodle side.

Agreed. In fact, I always try to be as upstream friendly as possible,
so we can follow the Scratch translation methodology, where a tarball
containing all the translations are generated and is integrated into
upstream each week.
Another concern is that there needs  to be some manual checking before
the files go into upstream. This is because some of the translators
have problems comprehending how to translate strings like "%s file"
and so on, mostly as a result of language barriers, and hence those
must be checked before they cause issues upstream :)

>
>> On the other hand, Pootle actually handles a large number of project
>> which are non-gettext based - in fact, we are the only large userbase
>> of Pootle who use gettext and PO files.
>
> Ah, ok. I didn't know that. We have to figure out a workflow that
> makes sense, I'll be happy to add glue wherever needed.
>

I'll go through the translation files again by the end of this week to
get a sense of what would work best for us.

>> Do you think that makes sense ?
>
> Yes, we can export stuff from moodle, but I want to figure out a
> workflow. What translation team have we got that would be good to
> discuss workflows and involve a bit as early adopters?
>

Hmm - the Japanese and the French teams come to my mind - I'll take a
look at the Moodle files once again and begin a
discussion/crossposting fest in the xs-devel and localization mailing
list on a possible workflow :-D

Cheers,
Sayamindu

-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]