Messages

So ... if someone does volunteer to act as "Forum Cleaner" and check for such 'spam members', just send me a message ! We need some who is checking for 'spam members' and their postings.

What happens if I delete my initial post and then re-post it? does this delete all answers as well?

Cheers, Bina

First Vox Humanitatis was thought to go to Great Britain, but soon we understood that we would not be able to cope with it in terms of traveling and time expenditure. Italy then was the next logical destination for us. Wanting to concentrate on our goals to reach and to minimize time expenditure for travel and organisational tasks we talked with an association we know well: GoPiedmont, we organised the Festa dël Piemont 2008 with them. They offered us to integrate also because our goals are very much the same: them concentrating on Piedmontese culture, us on less ressourced cultures on an international level. So that is how Vox Humanitatis now has its base in Alba, Piedmont, Italy.by (Bina Meusl)

May I ask you how come you copy and paste part of our website?

Hi, I am creating a set of dictionaries and I am giving you the link already now even if the readme file is still missing:

http://ambaradan.i-iter.org/voxhumanitatis/file/189696514ca7/dictionaryformids

License is cc-by-sa, license holder is Vox Humanitatis (http://www.voxhumanitatis.org)

I myself cannot manage the dfm dictionary creation from here. These files over time will be extended with basic terminology but also specific one. Maybe there is someone here reading who would like to care about the transformation of these files. Over time data from other resources will come along. I just received various text files that first of all need cleaning. For example for French-German. The textfile has approx. 80.000 entries - after cleaning this will be less, but considering its size: the data I received for a group of langauges will give us nice dictionaries.

Please contact me through the contact form on http://www.voxhumanitatis.org - I cannot come around all too often here.

Thank you!

Cheers, Bina

Sorry if I ask the obvious, but I read so many things at one time that I don't remember what is where and re-reading all is just too much right now.

What I understood out of an e-mail if I remember well is that DfM automatically sets the UI language to the language of the phone. That is if the UI language of my mobile phone is German, I get a German UI.

Do I have the possibility to chose any of the UI languages present in DfM, let's say Neapolitan, even if the UI of my mobile phone is German?

This question is relevant for quite some languages, because if we think about Africa in particular the UIs of phones are often not localized in the local language since the official language is French or English. The selection of languages for the localization we go for depends from this feature.

This is VERY interesting ... Is the format still a tab delimited text file? UTF-Format? If so: there is plenty of test data here:

http://ambaradan.i-iter.org/voxhumanitatis/file/3d99cd4d3416/anaphraseus

Sabine

Achim's Android version does not yet support the UI translations (unless Achim already implemented that recently).

The Android version supports localization from its beginning, I just did not advertise this as I was expecting many ongoing changes.
It's basically stable now, check out the XML-files here:
view
download

Hmmm ... this means that actually we have "two projects" with different formats, txt and xml. One person could do all since partly translations will be the same and there are not too many strings. I have some ideas, but have to test this. I'll let you know about it.

Is there any further stuff that would be relevant in many languages? Something like this documentation: http://dictionarymid.sourceforge.net/instruction.html ? How up to date is it (well I should see it this afternoon).

Sabine

But we can use 3-letter codes for those languages where there is no 2-letter-code.

Ok, this means the headers of the columns should be adapted.

Ok, so the best thing is: do a search/replace within the table. Whenever I find something wrong I create an issue on our website, because often I simply don't have the time to do things immediately.

But now you also see what I want to say when talking about translators "they are not used to how software actually works" - well some of them yes, but most of them not, therefore we must make it as easy as possible to get the UI-translations. I don't know how often I repeated: please don't do any copy/paste from one application to the other, because you don't know which "rubbish" you pull in ... I prefer three correct entries to twenty that then need to be corrected and which screw up all the other stuff.

I better go to bed now ... it's late. Good night to everyone who reads :-)

Yes, the issue should probably be this one:
http://www.voxhumanitatis.org/content/leading-spaces-finnish-terminology

I found leading spaces/tabs in the Finnish terminology - this was updated yesterday night. Here it does not produce problems since I work with semicolon as separator.

Attached a file with the corrected cells. If you can copy/paste the Finnish language column in the big table, please do - if you don't have time: I can do probably tomorrow.

Sabine

This is the latest UI file, right?

http://dictionarymid.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/dictionarymid/DictionaryForMIDs/src/de/kugihan/dictionaryformids/hmi_java_me/uidisplaytext/DictionaryForMIDs.languages

One thing that is not clearly visible here is what is "missing" in the translated versions.

-->Hi :-)

-->First of all let me see if the layout will be correct - anyway my answers will start with -->

Furthermore: translators are not used to do by "themselves" that is, copy from the page etc. So a file should be ready to be downloaded and translated instead of having to create an own one by copying and pasting and then adding a new language. This is just a hint - I know it is not difficult to do a copy/paste, but I also know my colleagues.

Thanks for giving us insight in the way of working for a translator !

Handling the file DictionaryForMIDs.languages is not comfortable, I know this. In order to add a language, a section needs to be added at the end of DictionaryForMIDs.languages and each line of that section must contain the translation for the corresponding text item. Likely a translator will use an intermediate step with an Excel file or similar; say what is CAT-Software ?

--> no, Excel files are not processed properly in most CAT-Tools. In case: a simple .txt file is fine. Normally utf-8 should be a good option since Windows and Linux do understand it well. Another good possibility is .po format where you can add information to each segment to be translated. This helps the translator to understand what he/she is actually translating.

--> CAT = Computer assisted translation - there are three tools I am mainly working with:
--> Omegat: http://omegat.org
--> Anaphraseus: http://anaphraseus.sourceforge.net/
--> Virtaal: http://virtaal.org

--> OmegaT is the one with the biggest community. Most people in their discussion group on yahoogroups deal with Open Source and could potentially help to localise the software.

--> A CAT-Tool helps you to create a TM (Translation Memory) which is a file in XML format. When you then have updates to a specific project you just load the old TM and you get all that was already translated as "100% match", eventually partial matches if there were changes in some segments or you have to translate what is completely new. This makes the localization process much faster.

One more hint: translating only the English words to another language may not always achieve the best result, cause the context may not be obvious; the section UIDisplayTextItems provides some more information on the context.

--> Like I said above: .po format should be a viable option then. Another possibility could be including the translations in Ambaradan and have people work there, but for that I have to talk to the developer first, since at the very basis Ambaradan is a dictionary application and I am actually not sure if we want to see software localization in there, even if it seems quite interesting to test it with such a small UI.

Ah, if there is any question or problem, please do ask.

--> Yes, I will :-)

1.1) How are the translations and updates maintained?

Via updates of the file DictionaryForMIDs.languages. DictionaryForMIDs.languages is put under 'revision control' in the DfM SVN repository at Sourceforge (I do put the file in the SVN repository).

The file DictionaryForMIDs.languages is parsed by the tool LanguageUIGeneration, see http://dictionarymid.sourceforge.net/LanguageUIGeneration.html (I do run LanguageUIGeneration after people provided the updated file DictionaryForMIDs.languages to me).

--> This means you anyway have to do this step manually. Ok - so let's see what could work. First I have to understand better what is already there, what is needed and how to combine things.

2.

2) Like mentioned in the mail: IMHO it would make sense to have "UI-Translation-days" going on around International Mother Language Day on 21 st of February. We will have a translation marathon for Dictionary entries.

Oh, that would be great to get support for the UI translations for DfM !! (a) For getting additional languages translated - and (b) to get existing languages completed. Concerning (b): we have the problem that at some point of time a person provides the UI translation for a language, but then the DfM development advances and we amend text items in the file DictionaryForMIDs.languages, for which we then do not have the translations (English is then used as a fallback for the missing text items). So for some UI translations now there are a few missing translations (it is roughly 3 to 10 missing text items for some languages).

Maybe ... you simple could try to circulate the file DictionaryForMIDs.languages at some persons who like to do such a sort of translation work ? I guess your organization and the International Mother Language Day really could be a chance for DfM to get more and better UI translations !

--> Simple question: do you want to create a "DfM localisation marathon" for IMLD 2010? Will get you a description by mail - it would be come too much here - only giving the final text/link should be less confusing for readers.


3.

your page is linked to ISO 639-2 langauge codes

Um, what exactly do you mean there ? The reference to ISO 639 for the parameter languageXFilePostfix ?

--> In the file to be localised there is a link to a language code list: http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/related/iso639.txt - this is a very short list and it excludes the majority of languages. We use ISO 639-3 for all languace codes which is maintained by SIL http://sil.org/iso639-3/codes.asp

--> Sorry but this got very long, but cutting out your comments would make it more difficult for others to follow.

Cheers, Sabine

Actually these are two connected questions or better various points.

1) As to the UI localization: is the source file a language.properties file? If so: it can be directly translated using OmegaT. This would avoid the conversion. Furthermore: translators are not used to do by "themselves" that is, copy from the page etc. So a file should be ready to be downloaded and translated instead of having to create an own one by copying and pasting and then adding a new language. This is just a hint - I know it is not difficult to do a copy/paste, but I also know my colleagues.

Their workflow is:
*take source file
*load it in CAT-Software
*translate
*export to target

1.1) How are the translations and updates maintained?

2) Like mentioned in the mail: IMHO it would make sense to have "UI-Translation-days" going on around International Mother Language Day on 21 st of February. We will have a translation marathon for Dictionary entries.
http://www.voxhumanitatis.org/content/international-mother-language-day-2010
we also have a facebook group for that:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=682271047&ref=ts#!/group.php?gid=209376066111&ref=ts

3) Language codes: your page is linked to ISO 639-2 langauge codes which in the meantime anyway is not enough because it leaves out over 6000 languages existing in the world. Is there a possibility to support ISO639-3 language codes?

I think that's all for now.

Cheers, Sabine