[FM Discuss] Translations
Chris Hofmann
chofmann at mozilla.com
Thu Jun 2 01:12:04 PDT 2011
On 6/1/11 10:36 PM, Edward Cherlin wrote:
<snip>
> I have been recruiting people for language work for years. Now that I
> know about this requirement, I will get right on it.
>
>> That's very reasonable. Sourcefabric has staff speaking many languages -
>> including Russian, Spanish, and Greek - that could help with that.
> OLPC and Sugar Labs have people working in nearly a hundred languages.
>
>
<snip>
>> I suggest the permanent solution is rather than using individual
>> imagemaps, to include one 'menu bar' on all user-facing pages with
>> context-sensitive buttons for the different languages. So if I'm an
>> Arabic speaker who has followed a link to the English manual on
>> bypassing censorship, the Arabic button will be 'lit up' in such a way
>> that indicates a translation is available, and I can switch to Arabic
>> with one click.
> Can you give us a link to a mockup?
>
>> In the event that a translation for a particular manual doesn't exist
>> yet, the link can go to a page in Arabic saying that translators are
>> welcome, how to contribute etc. I think you'll soon get more
>> translations started.
> Excellent. I'll help write the English version.
>
>> Also, rather than using the ISO language codes in the button graphic,
>> which are probably not familiar to non-geeks, we could use the name of
>> that language in the native character set.
> +1 Like Wikipedia.
>
>> The list of languages I'm aware of on FM is:
>>
>> ar
>> el
>> en
>> es
>> fa
>> fi
>> fr
>> hi
>> id
>> nl
>> ru
>> zh
> We should have Sugar manuals in many more. As soon as the translation
> features go live, I will start sending Cambodians, Haitians, and
> others to the site.
>
>> If there any others, please let me know. German, Italian and Portuguese
>> (for Brazil) would be good to have. Whatever scheme we come up with will
>> have to be extensible, of course.
>>
>> Cheers!
>>
>> Daniel
I'd suggest that any system that gets created have the combination of
ISO codes *and* language names.
This would allow browser detection in the backend to provide a better
user experience when accessing the FM site and allow things like
detecting browser language in use and showing manuals available in that
language or similar language groups. use ISO codes for the
infrastructure and backend stuff, and the language names for user
visible parts.
I've started studying the landscape of browser support, web app language
support, and use of language on the internet in general as part of some
UNESCO Language projects so I'm interested in following what's done here
to see how it fits in to the larger picture.
Here is a map of browser supported locales with both Firefox and IE
combined supporting around 100 locales.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n/BrowserLanguageSupport
wikipedia definitely appear to be the gold standard for web application
and content support with articles and web app translation at around 250+
actively updating locales.
it might also be interesting to look at how FM could be plugged into
http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Main_Page to help get more of the FM app
translated.
On a slightly related topic it might be interesting to have a
booksprint/create a manual that talks about language support in browsers
and on the web, and to help expand the support and use of a language on
the internet. We definitely need some help in cleaning up the
documentation on how to create a firefox localization to help new teams
get involved and I'd be interested in talking to anyone that wants to
help with that effort.
-chofmann
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