OOoCon 2005

Localization

The tools and the people

Adam Rambousek

Agenda

Speaker Introductions

Czech native lang project

Translation tools

Finding people

Organizing work

Correcting bugs

Q & A

Introductions

Czech Native-Lang project co-lead

Translator

Open source (OpenOffice.org, Drupal)

Computer games

Developer

Dictionary writing systems (Natural Language Processing Laboratory, Faculty of Informatics, MU Brno)

Czech Native-Lang project

Translated OpenOffice.org 1.x

Tools developing

2.0 localization based on experiences and translations from 1.x

“Guinea pig” for localization and build system

First completed community localization

GUI and help, about 1500 pages

Completed in July 2005, after 8 months of work

Source -> POT

Translatable strings in source files

Help XML files

Generate English GSI file

Contains all strings + information about them

Translate toolkit

Conversion between GSI (or other formats) and PO

And you have PO templates

PO files structure follows source structure

Translation

GNU gettext tools

msgmerge for reusing translated strings

fuzzy translation

GUI PO editors

For various operating systems

Web-based PO editors

KBabel

Very advanced, comfortable use

Translation memory, glossary PO

File checks

Catalog manager

Overview of whole project

CVS support

Mass operations

Pootle

KBabel

PO -> binary

Translate toolkit

Convert PO files to GSI files

Build OOo (language pack) from GSI

Build

Languages

All unofficial languages

32 (af bg bn br cs cy da de en-GB en-US et fi fr ga hr hu it km lt nb ne nl nn ns sk sl sr-CS sh-YU sv tn xh zu)

Operating systems

Linux, Solaris, MacOS X, Windows

More in Pavel Janík's presentation

Finding people

Define your requirements

How quickly you want/need the translation done?

Do you have money to spend?

How much?

Terminology

Volunteers vs. agency

Money

File format

Time

Test for interested people

Small part of actual files

Ability to translate the text

Ability to use the tools

Finding people, Czech project

Substantial part of GUI taken from 1.x

Needed to review, update, translate the rest

Done in a few weeks by a few people

Only a little part of Help translated

Help in 1.x translated, but difficult to reuse

GUI elements

Help = about 1500 pages

Price: about 30.000€

We chose community localization

Asking for help in mailing-list, IT servers etc.

18 people in team

Max. about half of them working at one moment

Organizing work

Communication (mail-list, IRC, real life)

Use CVS as much as possible

Keeping track of changes

Assigning files

Text divided to logically related blocks

One translator - one file

Check translation progress

Ask translators about their work

Statistics

Motivation

Sponsors

Translation statistics

Organizing work, Czech project

CVS at openoffice.org

Problem for some users

Most of the time one translator for a file

On-line statistics of translation status (with names)

Notable thresholds, temporary performance increase

Unfortunately only a few sponsors

Money, Linux magazine subscription

Correcting bugs

Using

Any user can find and report bug

Proofreading

Should be organized

On-line Help Link Creator

Release often

Better user feedback

Involve users in finding bugs

Use IZ or other bug tracking system

Provide simple bug reporting method

Not everyone is familiar with IZ

Mailing list, web forum

QA statistics

Correcting bugs, Czech project

(Almost) Every milestone released in Czech

Czech portal for users

Users are reporting bugs

IZ (component cs), Czech mailing list or web forum

Proofreading

Files with help links created

Translators and proofreaders checking files

Also English help checked during the translation process

Continue

Localization is never complete

Correct bugs

Synchronize translation with new versions

Marketing

Links

Translate toolkit

http://translate.sourceforge.net/

GNU gettext

http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/

PO editors

KBabel http://i18n.kde.org/tools/kbabel/

poEdit http://www.poedit.org/

gtranslator http://gtranslator.sourceforge.net/

Pootle http://pootle.wordforge.org/

Czech native lang project

http://cs.openoffice.org/

Translation statistics http://cs.openoffice.org/stats/

QA statistics http://cs.openoffice.org/qa/

Portal for users http://www.openoffice.cz/

Acknowledgments

This work has been partly supported by the Grant Agency of the Academy of Sciences of CR under the project 1ET100300419.

Localization

2005-09-02T23:47:18