Translations to English variants

That would be great. Picard translations are managed on Transifex at https://www.transifex.com/musicbrainz/musicbrainz/picard/

There is already a UK version there, but it needs updating :slight_smile:

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Give me a couple of days to setup an account and I’ll update the UK English language. I guess I can start with the US and shove it through a proper spell check.

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That would be much appreciated. Also keep in mind that the original source texts in English are usually done by the developer who implemented a specific feature, and most of us are not native English speakers. That also means the source texts might not be completely American English.

So feedback in improving certain texts is also welcome. If it is only a minor thing it is probably best to just fix it in the English “translation”, because each change in source text requis all translations to be updated. But real typos and grammatical mistakes should be fixed at the source.

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I have an annoying ability at spotting typos. I will bring in those skills here. :smiley: I’ve been an evil proof reader in the past, spotting all kinds of little bits that people missed on websites. I will keep a general eye out all round the language. Though nothing major has jumped out before while I have been using Picard. Just colo(u)rs is one of those classics that often stand out.

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I am now “in” at Transifex and will be updating in coming days.

Do you have any date of your next update release?

I’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 don’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 “colour” and “colours” 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 “occured” with one “r” will show up a mistake that needs correcting to “occurred” with two r’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 “occurred”.

The correct way would be to actually add a English (US) “translation”, 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 doesn’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 “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 :wink:

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.

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

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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

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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 “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.

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Just in case your head hasn’t exploded yet, we might need to Conversate a little more. You may wish to consider adding the “Urban Dictionary” 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 “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 ))

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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. I’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 I’ll otherwise need to repost…

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Ok. I’ll wait and see what happens.

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

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?

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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 :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 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.

  2. 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.

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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. :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 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)