Hi all!
I've started collecting some guidelines to help avoid some common
pitfalls that make lives harder for the folks who put hard work into
translating our user interface, thanks to some excellent feedback from
Siebrand at TranslateWiki going through our current set of messages:
http://status.net/wiki/I18n_guidelines
We're going to need to do a lot of cleanup on message formatting such as
where sentences or paragraphs are being split up -- which can make for
very awkward word order in translations -- and start using ngettext()
calls so languages with more complex plural forms will be supported
correctly.
More generally, we need to start thinking more about keeping our
terminology clear and consistent, and making sure that messages have, or
are documented with, enough context that translators know how to handle
them.
Source code references are in the raw .po file but they're not coming
through in the TranslateWiki interface yet, but what we could *really*
use are something more like screenshots that we could stash in the
message descriptions on the wiki.
A script that can pull updated screenshots of the various web forms and
upload them to TranslateWiki would be awesome if someone wants to try
their hand! :)
Remember that translators might not have access to every bit of the UI
on a public site like identi.ca; administrator interfaces in particular
won't be visible, and they tend to have a lot of jargon that may not be
clear without context!
As for consistency in terminology, we probably want to settle more
clearly on the tone of the user interface. A lot of software tends to be
moderately formal (and may, for instance, avoid contractions like
"they're" and "don't" in favor of "they are" and "do not").
On the other hand this is social media, and we're pretty informal. :) I
lean towards informal myself, while Siebrand has recommended the more
formal style, in part because it can be clearer for non-native speakers
and is easier to translate consistently.
I've temporarily reverted a couple commits that started standardizing
those to give folks a chance to give feed back first -- what do people
think is best here?
-- brion vibber (brion @ status.net)
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