Translations to English variants

I am now ā€œinā€ at Transifex and will be updating in coming days.

Do you have any date of your next update release?

Iā€™ve also picked up the Canadian and Aussie language files alongside the UK and US.

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No. The plan is currently to go for a 2.3, which we will do once we think we have enough features ready and it is time to ship again. So we are talking about longer, and also there will likely be string changes. I donā€™t want to have long delays like in the past where we had a year or more between releases. But > 2 months for sure, maybe longer.

If we get some issues that require a faster fixing we could slip in a 2.2.2 release (also it is a nice version number).

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The Transifex site is surprisingly easy to use. That means ā€œcolourā€ and ā€œcoloursā€ have been corrected for UK, Australian and Canadian English.

I think it is booked in correctly, but having never used the site before I cannot be sure.

A different typing error has been spotted and corrected in translation. I cannot edit the US English original, but a search for ā€œoccuredā€ with one ā€œrā€ will show up a mistake that needs correcting to ā€œoccurredā€ with two rā€™s.

I also notice that English (Australian) is a language available for translation, but it does not appear in the list of available languages within Picard.

I will be doing a much deeper read and check of these language files, but for now I think those corrections should be available for any 2.2.2 release.

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Thanks, I fix ā€œoccurredā€.

The correct way would be to actually add a English (US) ā€œtranslationā€, currently this does not exist as such.

This is because we only inlcude languages that are reasonable complete. We have low standards here, as I think a partial translations helps users already and maybe encourages some to help improve the translation. But still I think the last time we went for at least 40 or 50 percent translation. This doesnā€™t make much sense for Australian English, as this can be seen more like an extension of the existing default texts. I could forcefully include it, but currently it also does not seem to provide much value except the fixed typo you mentioned (https://www.transifex.com/musicbrainz/musicbrainz/viewstrings/#en_AU/picard/157984455?q=translated%3Ayes)

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The strange side of ā€œEnglishā€ translation from a US original is that they will never be complete. No need to be. There literally is only a very small number of words that the Americanā€™s spell incorrectly.

Words like ā€œColour, Licence, Practiceā€ are all that need to be corrected. There is no point in blindly copying over every sentence that would stay identical. That just leads to transposition errors creeping in.

The Australianā€™s and Canadianā€™s share our Britā€™s native spelling. I donā€™t think there will be much that is ever different between the three. But we all appreciate not being lumped in with a nation that canā€™t spell :wink:

So far Iā€™ve given the whole file a speed read through whilst loaded up in a British spell checker. Hence spotting ā€œoccuredā€. Pretty sure the most obvious items have been swept up this way.

I will be combing deeper into the file in the days to come, but personally Iā€™d be more inclined to REMOVE more of the untranslated lines to allow the English (UK) file to shrink to only those lines that actually need translation.

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Gimme a brake. :laughing: Seriously though, nice work.

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us Australianā€™s do share the same spelling as the uk but we sometimes use different words to the UK and USA for things like gumboots instead of Wellington boots and so on

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I am not denying you USAians your choice of butchering our beautifully crafted language that took us many centuries to steal piece by piece from all our neighbours.

And there is at least one Aussie around here who would appreciate the ā€œuā€ back in Colour. Gā€™day @St3v3p - I have now duly noted the requirement of using gumboots in the language file. And you can be assured Iā€™ll be going over the whole US language file with a slang dictionary looking for anything else relevant.

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Just in case your head hasnā€™t exploded yet, we might need to Conversate a little more. You may wish to consider adding the ā€œUrban Dictionaryā€ to your resources. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Conversate :exploding_head: TTFN

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That valuable resource is already in the list. Way ahead of you there. Along with the Oxford English Dictionary. That is rather handy as they will show the differences with that USAian language you speak. (Why is it called ā€œAmericanā€ when it is only spoken in the ā€œUnited States of Americaā€?)

(I am seeing this translation conversation is drifting away from the main Picard 2.2 bug threadā€¦ Iā€™m expecting this tangent to be suddenly split away a few posts back ( Around Post 23 or Post 27 ))

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@IvanDobsky here is a source for Australian english it is used in the unis and here https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/ and here is some of our slang some words have different meanings depending on who is asking like old fella it can mean your father http://www.koalanet.com.au/australian-slang.html

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Thanks @st3v3p, very handy. Iā€™ll give 'em a check through. I was making use of this fella to check up that colour and other words are generally spelt the same as us Brits. https://australiandictionary.blogspot.com/2017/11/is-it-colour-or-color.html

And listened to plenty of McGrath on the cricket commentaries this past summer. :smiley:

Hopefully this will go back to being a thread on the forum again soon once @Freso works out the buttons to press. There were valid questions to @outsidecontext lost up there which Iā€™ll otherwise need to repostā€¦

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Ok. Iā€™ll wait and see what happens.

@outsidecontext I think my question has got lost in this bizarre dance. So Iā€™ll ask again and re-phrase it. :slight_smile:

What is a ā€œcompletedā€ translation? Do I need to load up every sentence\phrase and copy it across even if there is no change?

90% of USA English is going to be identical. There are only a small selection of words like Colour, Aluminium, Licence, Organise that are affected. It makes more sense to me to be only translating that small selection of phrases to avoid introducing other errors, and to literally save on resources.

If I only translate the phrases that need translation, will this still set the ā€œfully translatedā€ flag for the language?

Is there a way for me to set a phrase as ā€œtranslation not neededā€ for those 90% of cases where the English (UK) and English (UK\Aus\Can) require no translation?

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I donā€™t think it makes sense to translate all, I would only translate those parts that are actually different. That is much easier to maintain. But of course Transifex will not show the translation as complete. The percentage shows how many of the segments or words (not sure which metric it uses) of the total source have translations. If it is missing it is not counted. Otherwise all translations would be complete all the time :smiley:

For us this is not really an issue. We have basically two metrics in play:

  1. When we update translations we only synchronize translations that are at least 5% complete. That shields us from those empty translations that are not really useful. Everything above this we synchronize with the Picard source code. But we can also manually synchronize the files, and since the English spelling variants donā€™t change often Iā€™m fine with just syncing them manually from time to time. We could also adapt our sync script to separately sync those.

  2. We donā€™t enable all languages for selection in the options, to have at least a minimum of UI coverage. If the user selects a language we donā€™t want them to search for something translated in the UI, they should at least see parts of it translated. If you change language and nothing visible gets translated thatā€™s frustrating and not understandable. If you see at least parts translated you can understand that translation is incomplete, maybe you even look into helping translate it.

    Currently we take translations into the UI if they are at least 40% complete, but this is just some arbitrary threshold really. This is also manual, not something automated so does not apply for the case here.

In general I would like to improve the visibility of the translation thing and get more people contribute translations. We have many translations that where created years ago and maybe once even where in a good shape, but are now rotting away slowly. But it is no surprise, we donā€™t make it easy for people to discover that they can help translating.

Iā€™m thinking about a contribution page with details on how to do translation on the website and some links to it from inside the application. Especially if you choose a incomplete translation there should be some hint for the user that they can help improve it.

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Excellent. We are on the same page. That is what Iā€™ll be doing. Whilst making sure the file gets past your ā€œat least 5% translatedā€ level.

I will be doing a direct compare offline, but I am pretty sure there is nothing major that will change between UK\Aus\Can. Once I have confirmed that, Iā€™ll be pulling all three into line so they are clones of each other. Making them easier to maintain. This also means they may well shrink in completeness if I sling out blocks that donā€™t need translating.

First stage - make them correct translations. (Already improved from what was previously there.)

Second stage - make them more inline with each other. (Take a few more weeks to comb through.)

Yeah, that logic makes sense. Iā€™ll now make the offical request to ā€œEnable Australian Englishā€ as I know there is at least one person who will be using that. And there are Canadianā€™s around the forum too. We all like avoiding that Broken US English. :wink:

LOLZ - that is why I was trying to get us into our own thread. And then we fell down into a Discourse black hole. :rofl:

The Transifex site is a comical combination of incredibly geeky to make sense of, whilst being comically simple to work with. I donā€™t yet have a clue as to what most of the site is up to, but I have successfully used the built in GUI to correct the three relevant languages.

I assume I am mainly supposed to focus on only the ā€œPICARDā€ file and ignore everything else like Android Apps and so forth. (Though I did correct ā€œLicenceā€ in the ā€œServerā€ text file)

The Australian English file is only ā€œ1.4% translatedā€. And yet it looks like it is probably the most correct English file there.

The only strings translated in the Australian version are the strings that actually need translating. Which makes it much easier to check.

The UK and Canadian versions are full of text just copied from US to UK without change. Artificially bloating the file and the ā€œcompletenessā€ stat.

If it is okay with you @outsidecontext, I will strip the UK and Canadian versions back to the same levels as Australian. This makes the stats look ā€œoddā€ but is more correct. It also makes the language file much easier to check through.

Another time Iā€™ll go through the online manuals for Transifex and see if I can find a way to tick off the items that donā€™t need translation so that percentage can come up a bit.

-=-=-

Meanwhileā€¦ I have found a place where those Crazy Canucks use USA spelling for words like customise\customize. Need to check deeper on that one, but is a good divergence from the US and UK versions.

This is a handy resource as it picks out those US \ British \ Canadian differences
https://www.lukemastin.com/testing/spelling/cgi-bin/database.cgi?database=spelling

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Already done :wink:

Iā€™m fine with this, makes sense.

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Excellent. Bruce, Sheila and the Kangaroo :kangaroo: will be happy to get rid of that broken English spelling.

I also promise not to add any cheeky references to Broad, Archer or Stokesā€¦ ( :cricket_bat_and_ball: )

As an Engineer, my Dad taught me to write U/S onto kit that is broken or UnServiceable. Which does make me laugh when I see English (US) as it is an accurate description :wink:

I will also be stripping back those UK and Canadian version at the weekend. Make the differences much clearer then. It will have a comedic effect of looking like I had done LESS translation at the end of this task than when I started. :smiley:

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