Announcing the Open Source Translation Database
By Andrew Smith
Translating software is hard, I know from my experience of starting two new open source projects (ISO Master and Asunder) about the challenges of learning how to use Gettext, finding volunteers to do the translations, encouraging and enabling them to translate my software.
The work was worth it for me, I now have almost 70 full translations of my software in 40 languages. But I’d like to make the process of getting your first translation easier, and generally help more software maintainers to get more translations with less effort.
The OSTD ( http://littlesvr.ca/ostd/ ) is an automatic translations system – it will take your .POT file and populate it with translations based on strings in other open source software, generating .PO files. Given that you can see which software the strings come from – this will be much more accurate than other automatic translation systems such as Google Translate.
I just started the project so there is a lot of polish still coming, and some significant features such as updating existing .PO files and a web service interface for other software to use. But it can be useful as it is already. Please try it out!
Any feature requests and bug reports are welcome. My goal is to make it as useful as possible to as many people as possible. I’m doing this part time, but I’m excited about the project and will do my best to improve it as quickly as possible.
March 9th, 2012 at 14:58
Yes, the software translation is really very difficult, as the translator even having certain or necessary background knowledge, doesn’t see the context or the word “environment”. The thing turn even more complicated because of the difference in the logic of each language, polysemantic words etc. I am an Armenian translator. In Armenian we have but very few word with different meanings and each word has several synonyms, to chose the right one one must have the full context. Using jargon complicates the thing even more. One may have certain knowledge, but not belonging to the field and not knowing the professional jargon (that is not universal but local and group) can’t guess what meaning is given to the word, that seems to have nothing to do with the field. It would be nice to find a solution to these problems. Anyway, whenever my time permits, shall be glad to translate your strings into Armenian.
Jasmine
March 9th, 2012 at 15:39
Thanks for the comment Jasmine. I know exactly what you mean, which is why every translation offered lists the software where it is from. I am hoping that in most cases that will be enough for the developer to decide whether it’s likely a good translation, without knowing the rules of the language.