Hi all, first time contributing to this project. I picked a Chinese (Simplified) string to translate and what I see is:
name: LogoEnglish: “A logo that is specific to a particular event and only used for it, rather than being the logo for a series (such as a festival logo reused over multiple years).”
My previous understanding was that good translations usually need more context — where this text shows up in the UI, who reads it, tone, etc. But here I only have the source string description itself, no screenshot or surrounding context.
Is the intended workflow to just translate based on what the English says? Or am I missing where the extra context lives (screenshots tab, comments, glossary)?
Thanks!
Hi! This specifically is the description string for the “Logo” event art type inside the “Attributes” project. As such, admittedly the amount of context is small - you can tell is an event art type from this in the sidebar:
It will mostly be displayed as a standalone description.
Other strings, mostly in the server component, will include a link to the code file where they come from, which in many cases (but not always) would be enough for someone who uses MusicBrainz often to figure out where it will be displayed. That said, I agree we should have better context information for many strings - we have at least tried to add the bare minimum (like whether something is meant as a verb or a noun, or in a button vs a header) in the code, but we want to eventually figure out better ways to do it.
In general, the /musicbrainz translations are expected to be user-facing (admin-only strings are not translated) so the tone should be whatever is a good fit in Chinese for a user-oriented string. In English we try to be polite but informal. In Spanish I would be more informal than polite (most “please see X” will just become “see X” in Spanish). I have no idea what the right tone would be for Chinese.
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To add to the above: What is presented on Weblate depends on what is available. It is possible to e.g. add UI screenshots to be shown alongside the strings. But this is a lot of work to take the screenshots and match the strings and it gets outdated over time. You can also add additonal comments and details, but again someone has to put in the work.
For Picard I did this once for most of the UI. But with recent changes a lot has become outdated already.
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I think you also added a lot of comments and such for the Picard User Guide on Weblate. 
There were very few left for me to add, as I’ve gone through the translation strings.
The way things are structured for the User Guide (Weblate components matching each of the pages in the User Guide so that it’s easy to find the page containing the string being translated), I actually suggest having a copy of the latest version open in another tab to see the strings in context.
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Nice tip, thanks! Keeping the User Guide open in another tab sounds like the easiest way to grab context. Big props to outsidecontext for all the groundwork 
Ah gotcha, makes sense — screenshots and comments are a lot of effort to keep fresh. Appreciate the work you’ve put into Picard!
Thanks! Good to know it’s an event art type description. The “polite but informal” framing helps a lot — I’ll go with what feels natural for Chinese. Just submitted my first translation 
