Time for a new language file format in Joomla?
I have tried to do a little bit of translation over the last few months, and got my wife to help me with some other things (she is a pro translator).
And the way of working with Joomla language files was characterized as "stone age" by someone I chatted with today. Why?
There are a lot of great tools available for translation today. Some will set you back a serious amount of money, and some are free and open source. But all the ones that are still being updated have one thing in common: They do not support .ini files.
From what I have been able to find out, the .ini files we use in Joomla has a lot in common with the kind of language files that was used in Windows. Don't know if it is still being used, but it dates back to at least Windows XP.
The two major formats that are being used now are XLIFF and .po and I think that Joomla 1.7 would be a good opportunity to change the language format so that we could start using better tools for the translation.
What can we gain by this? Take a look at one tool called Virtaal:
http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/virtaal/index
This tool will help you with your translation. It will remember things you have translated, and if a new part is similar, it will make suggestions (Translation Memory). Not only for the file you are translating now, but for all the files you will translate in the future if you want it to.
So if you have translated a login module before, and a couple of months later will translate a different login module, the task should be easy because many of the expressions will be the same.
This will also help you to be consistent throughout your translation process.
You also have collaborative tools like Transifex - https://www.transifex.net/ This is a community of translators and you can set it up to grab the strings to be translated directly from your vcs.
I am positive to anything that can help making the job of getting Joomla out in the worl easier and faster!
Have you tried translating anything yourself?
Do you think this sounds like a good idea? Why - or why not?
If you think it sounds like a good ide, how can we do things to get this in as a part of the 1.7 features?
And the way of working with Joomla language files was characterized as "stone age" by someone I chatted with today. Why?
There are a lot of great tools available for translation today. Some will set you back a serious amount of money, and some are free and open source. But all the ones that are still being updated have one thing in common: They do not support .ini files.
From what I have been able to find out, the .ini files we use in Joomla has a lot in common with the kind of language files that was used in Windows. Don't know if it is still being used, but it dates back to at least Windows XP.
The two major formats that are being used now are XLIFF and .po and I think that Joomla 1.7 would be a good opportunity to change the language format so that we could start using better tools for the translation.
What can we gain by this? Take a look at one tool called Virtaal:
http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/virtaal/index
This tool will help you with your translation. It will remember things you have translated, and if a new part is similar, it will make suggestions (Translation Memory). Not only for the file you are translating now, but for all the files you will translate in the future if you want it to.
So if you have translated a login module before, and a couple of months later will translate a different login module, the task should be easy because many of the expressions will be the same.
This will also help you to be consistent throughout your translation process.
You also have collaborative tools like Transifex - https://www.transifex.net/ This is a community of translators and you can set it up to grab the strings to be translated directly from your vcs.
I am positive to anything that can help making the job of getting Joomla out in the worl easier and faster!
Have you tried translating anything yourself?
Do you think this sounds like a good idea? Why - or why not?
If you think it sounds like a good ide, how can we do things to get this in as a part of the 1.7 features?
-
Comment by Amy Stephen on September 24, 2010 at 7:25pm
-
Interesting, Wordpress uses GNU gettext localization. Tools are on that page, too. Here's their translation file.
In the past six months-year, Drupal created an online resource for translations. That includes their modules, too, so a team working on a specific language can organize the work and distribute it from that location.
Joomla! has a number of Extensions that are quite nice. Have you looked at any of them? The format changed in 1.6 so those will need to be adapted.
Thanks for getting the discussion going. Important.
-
Comment by Svein Wisnaes on September 24, 2010 at 8:23pm
-
The format WP uses is one of the two I mentioned - .po (or POT) - so it makes perfect sense :-) This file can be opened by a range of translation tools including Virtaal. The files Joomla is using has no current tools...
And regarding the JED category you are mentioning: Yes. I have looked at them. And with all respect - they are just plain text editors. No help. And some of them don't even work.
The real problem is the format for the language files. It effectively prevents us to use any real translation tools. The one extension that could be of help on JED is not working. And the forum on the website of the dev is closed. So no way to report any bugs.
But why should we have to jump through hoops to get the work done? Why not start using what is common in the open source world and be able to benefit from all the work that is being done out there?
-
Comment by Robert Deutz on September 25, 2010 at 3:20am
-
some months ago I found http://mygengo.com/string/ and I think this could be a good tool for creating language files. My first test were not so successfully, but it is beta and I think in the meantime they made some progress.
-
Comment by Horus68 on September 25, 2010 at 6:57am -
MyGengo String http://mygengo.com/string/about (its free) allows .ini files and it does work with Joomla files with collaborative work. It only have problems on header lines from 1.6 languages files. They want to collaborate to solve issues but it will require more people on test side with better knowledge than mine (already posted that on Joomla translation teams forum)!
That been said, if Joomla want to be a full international tool it must allow an easy step to collaborative (online) work on translation. Note that I don't agree with a full and official centralized translation work as I've read sometime ago, somewhere else.
-
Comment by Horus68 on September 25, 2010 at 7:09am
-
Sorry for double post, it just to point alternative tools also noticed on Joomla forum:
(on Narro) Proposed new translation facility - http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=507026
Narro is open source and licensed GPLv2. http://narro-project.blogspot.com/
You can browse the project code here: http://code.google.com/p/narro
http://groups.google.com/group/narro-project?pli=1
And a side note for an extension:
Translations Manager - http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/languages/language-edition/...
-
-
Paulo - you can post and post and post. No apologies required.
Thanks HarryB was looking for that last night.
Gengo looks nice.
-
-
Gengo looks interesting. From what I see it is very similar to Transifex that I mentioned in the first post, except it has support for .ini files and is not open source (from what I understand). But I would like to know from someone that has used both of them how well the translation process works because both of these looks more like a tool for organizing the translation files than doing the actual translation.
A translation tool would at least have a translation memory. This is a tool that will suggest a translation for you based on translations you have done before. And in this area of translation, there is a lot of repetition :-) Also, a built in connection to Google translate is good, as well as a tool that can look up words in Wikipedia.
You could of course argue that you can have one webpage for each of these and copy/paste between them. But it is exactly this kind of translation process that is referred to as "stoneage translation workflow".
What we need to do is make sure that translators can do the job without knowing anything about programming. After all, they are translators :-)
Moving Joomla in sync with most of the world of FOSS would not be a bad thing in my book. It might even make it easier to get more translators to work on each project.
HarryB - Exactly my point - why should Joomla not do the same?
Horus68 - Translation Manager is not a translation tool. It is a plain text editor. It is an extension of Joomla, it lines up theparts of the translation and give you an overview of how many percent that has been translated. But it is still a text editor. What we need is to be able to use all the translation tools out there that can really help in the translation process. The book keeping of translation is something I leave to the programmers :-)
For the book keeping, Transifex looks like a really nice tool and it is open source. We could get Transifex install as http://translate.joomla.com/ and host all translations that had to do with Joomla in one place. Or we could just open a project on the Transifex site.
For the programmers among us: What is keeping Joomla from switching to .po files instead of .ini files?
-
Comment by Horus68 on September 25, 2010 at 4:42pm
-
Svein: I do understand your point on a translation tools. I was just pointing the actual situation!
I also would love to have a translation tool with memory, mass edit, connection to google translator and dictionary in an online collaborative way. If that requires changing Joomla files or not, I don't know but it could be a good trade-off if not an improvement.
As for Gengo: You upload the complete site or admin files of Joomla (as master files), you set the languages to translate, each files gets its own section, then you can translate each string (they go as independent lines). It have a search on project so you can edit all the occurrences in the same screen.
It allows you to see (in graphical mode) what is left to be translated. You can do it with with a team. When finalized you can pack and download the zip file with that language files inside.
Its nice to work on, but Joomla files loose the header lines! Also problems when importing comment lines with ! and $ on it... and all joomla ini files had it on headers too!
-
-
Horus68 - Thank you for commenting.
Yes, I know about the extensions for translation. It is partly why I have written this blog post. There is one tool there that actually would have helped the whole situation - Jolomea
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/languages/language-edition/...
but it is not working and I have a problem getting in touch with the dev.
Regarding Gengo - do you know if it is open source? Also, does it assist you in the translation, or is it just an online book-keeping and text editor?
Personally, I am not too worried about having any kind of collaborative translation. I prefer a good tool on my computer (not in a web page) that I can use to translate in.
BUT - again - a system that keeps track of what has been translated or not is good for the developers so they get nice charts etc. :-)
Priority number one regarding localization is to make it easier for the translators to do the job. And I have not found any up-to-date tools for translating .ini files. The two big formats for translation is .po and XLIFF. So either we need to be able to convert the .ini files to .po or we need to get Joomla to change...
I am still wondering - What is the reason for Joomla to use .ini files?
© 2012 Created by Amy Stephen.
You need to be a member of All Together, As A Whole to add comments!
Join All Together, As A Whole