Dear polyglots,
I had a chat with @jenia at WordCamp Switzerland’s Contributor day today about improving the Glossaries and the translation style guides so we can help new contributors get started faster.
Improve the translate.wordpress.org Glossaries
Jenia and the Global theme at WordPress.com have an amazing set of Glossaries already built which we can definitely reuse. They have glossaries for 22 languages and I thought that we could reuse them if that’s ok with the translation editors.
You can check them out at https://en.support.wordpress.com/translation-resources/. They also use GlotPress, so you can just export their Glossary and import it for your own locale.
Translation Style Guides on Rosetta sites
With the upcoming wave of new contributors around plugins and themes, keeping consistency among translations for the same locales is essential. It all starts with a good instruction manual, so I thought we could make it a requirement for each team to create at least a short instruction manual with general guide lines for translating.
I know this is a lot to ask and hard work that many of you might be intimidated by. However, we don’t need to invent the wheel. Luckily we already have resources to help us out.
So here are a few resources you can benefit from before building a page
- Check out the style guides WordPress.com built for the same 22 languages
- Microsoft have super extensive guides for a lot of languages. Those are too long, but might be interesting for many of you anyway. We don’t need such extensive guides. Just general directions.
- Facebook have really nice style guides for translating too. They’re shorter and straight to the point.
Including a short introduction page for new translators on your Rosetta sites
Some teams have already done that, but it would be great to include it in most of the Rosetta sites for new contributors.
This is what I think each page should include, but you are welcome to modify depending on your locale requirements:
It would be good to have a discussion about it during the next polyglots chat and leave your comments below with your example pages if you already have one, it would be good to browse ideas and get more suggestions.
Thanks @jenia for all the tips!
Cheers!
Petya
Alvaro Gois dos Santos 1:23 pm on September 24, 2015 Permalink | Log in to Reply
As I understand it, we have two different strings in GlotPress, one for the normal use, that is, the way it’s actually written with the apostrophe, and the other with it’s correspondent replacement with secure code instead of the apostrophe.
I´m not sure, though, this only applies to words where the apostrophe is in the beginning or the end of the word.
akerbeltzalba 2:05 pm on September 24, 2015 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I’m pretty certain this is about a bug I was involved with. Some languages have left-curling apostrophes as word characters at the start of a word i.e. ’twas in English and ‘ga in Scots Gaelic are, when using formatted typography, have ’twas and ’ga respectively (though this forum may scramble them (which is precisely how this bug came about).
As far as I recall, if a locale requires this feature, it needs to supply a finite list of these (at the moment only English Cockney and Scots Gaelic are affected and in both, a finite list is doable), so I need to supply: ’gam, ’gad, ’ga, ’gar, ’gur, ’gan, ’s, ’r, ’am, ’ad, ’n, ’m, ’g, ’nam, ’na, ’nur, ’nar, ’nan
What I’m not 100% certain about is what to do if this does not affect a locale. I’m guessing just leave the string untranslated? It seems to need a better comment though.
This is the bug I think this relates to https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/31953