The strange side of “English” 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 American’s spell incorrectly.
Words like “Colour, Licence, Practice” 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 Australian’s and Canadian’s share our Brit’s native spelling. I don’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 can’t spell
So far I’ve given the whole file a speed read through whilst loaded up in a British spell checker. Hence spotting “occured”. 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 I’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.
us Australian’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
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 “u” back in Colour. G’day @St3v3p - I have now duly noted the requirement of using gumboots in the language file. And you can be assured I’ll be going over the whole US language file with a slang dictionary looking for anything else relevant.
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 “American” when it is only spoken in the “United States of America”?)
(I am seeing this translation conversation is drifting away from the main Picard 2.2 bug thread… I’m expecting this tangent to be suddenly split away a few posts back ( Around Post 23 or Post 27 ))
And listened to plenty of McGrath on the cricket commentaries this past summer.
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 I’ll otherwise need to repost…
@outsidecontext I think my question has got lost in this bizarre dance. So I’ll ask again and re-phrase it.
What is a “completed” 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 “fully translated” flag for the language?
Is there a way for me to set a phrase as “translation not needed” for those 90% of cases where the English (UK) and English (UK\Aus\Can) require no translation?
I don’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
For us this is not really an issue. We have basically two metrics in play:
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 don’t change often I’m fine with just syncing them manually from time to time. We could also adapt our sync script to separately sync those.
We don’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 don’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 that’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 don’t make it easy for people to discover that they can help translating.
I’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.
Excellent. We are on the same page. That is what I’ll be doing. Whilst making sure the file gets past your “at least 5% translated” 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, I’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 don’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. I’ll now make the offical request to “Enable Australian English” as I know there is at least one person who will be using that. And there are Canadian’s around the forum too. We all like avoiding that Broken US English.
LOLZ - that is why I was trying to get us into our own thread. And then we fell down into a Discourse black hole.
The Transifex site is a comical combination of incredibly geeky to make sense of, whilst being comically simple to work with. I don’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 “PICARD” file and ignore everything else like Android Apps and so forth. (Though I did correct “Licence” in the “Server” text file)
The Australian English file is only “1.4% translated”. 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 “completeness” 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 “odd” but is more correct. It also makes the language file much easier to check through.
Another time I’ll go through the online manuals for Transifex and see if I can find a way to tick off the items that don’t need translation so that percentage can come up a bit.
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Meanwhile… 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.
Excellent. Bruce, Sheila and the 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 Stokes… ( )
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
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.
Thanks, @st3v3p , you are now official Australian language adviser. I’ll check in with you on the unusual ones. I’ve realised the task that I need to practise centres on organised and standardised advice to correct the colourful language that is favourite to us all. And reversing the cancelled state of Australian has been my initial priority. There was a clear catalogue of mistakes, and all the grey areas are now being fixed now that I have a licence to make these corrections.
Hehe… that covers most of them. That above paragraph should send the USA spell checkers into melt down. It should also be correct in Australian, but the Canadians do like their z’s.
It is funny though. Feels like going back to school. Getting my head back around the differences in nouns and verbs. I had actually forgotten that there is a difference between practise and practice…
And thanks @Freso for hooking us back out of the Black Hole we fell into
In UK that should be “built-in”. I’ve found it in the Aussie dictionary too. Will have to check deeper for the Canadians, but will start with correcting it for now as the Canadians clearly lean on proper spellings in the majority of cases.
Making good progress in stripping out the old untranslated sentences. Making the whole file easier to check, and easier to spot a few more authorize \ authorise style corrections.
I have also found good reasons for that clearout - there have been errors on that side that were hidden by the GUI.
Actually, here is a question for ALL English readers.
Is “OK” ever written as “Ok”?
In British English OK is an abbreviation of okay. Never see it as Ok. So this is being corrected to the all caps version.
But what about the phrase “OK Match”. Should that be “Okay Match” when used in a list of Good Match \ Bad Match as other choices? Or do I leave it as “OK Match”
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Weird forum… insists on weird nanny rules which make it harder to keep things clear… so everything has to be piled into the same edit. Yuk.
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@outsidecontext I assume you are checking the US original for consistency? I notice that sometimes there will be a colon on the end of a phrase, sometimes not. Different patterns in Capitals I assume caused by menus or titles.
For example, you usually set “section titles” in the Options To Mixed Capitals. But look at the OPTIONS \ Preferred Releases page and your sections are missing Capitals (Preferred Release Types, Preferred Release Countries, Preferred Release Formats).
What about titles on Buttons? Have a look at the OPTIONS \ PLUGINS and two different ways of naming buttons. Should they be capitals on each word? And you seem to have forgotten the … on the middle button. (I remember … as meaning “opens a dialog window”)
Have you a written down defined rule for these? My levels of natural pattern matching spot that stuff from a mile out. So if you want a comb through of the GUI as seen on screen to pick those out, then just ask and It Will Be So. (Yeah - one of the buttons at the bottom of the page is also missing the “All Caps Look”)
I’ll have these English Translations finished up by the end of the day. Australian first as it is easiest to work with by not being filled with untranslated extras.
Seriously though, nice work.
TTFN
will be happy to get rid of that broken English spelling.
)
That above paragraph should send the USA spell checkers into melt down. It should also be correct in Australian, but the Canadians do like their z’s.