[wp-polyglots] Tips for translating with Rosetta

[Morgan Doocy]

Hi all,

Just thought I'd write with some instructions on what Rosetta is and 
how to use it.

Rosetta is the Ubuntu project's online collaboration tool for software 
localization. To use Rosetta you'll need to create an account. The 
registration links from within Rosetta itself don't really work for 
some reason, but you can register at:

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/join_form

This will create an account that is usable from within Rosetta.

Next go to the WordPress repository in Rosetta:

https://launchpad.ubuntu.com/rosetta/products/wordpress/wordpress-1.5/

Here you can click the "Log In" link to log in to your account. Then 
just click on the localization you'd like to work on, and start 
translating! (Note that if you don't see your localization in the list, 
add it to "My Languages" in the "My Preferences" page, and it will show 
up in the main list of languages.)

The translation interface works as follows: it will display 10 messages 
at a time, with their U.S. English originals ("Sources") and a text box 
to enter the translation for that message. Enter the appropriate 
translations for whichever messages you can translate; for those that 
you can't quite figure out how to translate, either just leave it 
blank, or enter your best attempt and check "Needs review," depending 
on your confidence in your translation. You can skip forward and 
backward in the list by clicking "Next 10 messages »" or "« Previous 10 
messages."

If you need to look at the context of a message, click "Located in" to 
get a list of the locations in the WordPress code where the message is 
called. From there, depending on how buried the message is, you may be 
able to discern under what context the message is displayed, and 
perhaps even try to reproduce the message yourself in the WordPress 
interface.

Tips for good translations:
  - When possible, try to use only HTML character entities for any 
extended or accented characters. This is important to be sure the 
characters are displayed correctly for all users, since users are 
allowed to customize the character encoding they use in WordPress, and 
the translations are not converted between character encodings. Note, 
however, that for languages with non-latin based characters (e.g. 
Chinese, Japanese, Arabic), entering messages literally is much more 
practical than using HTML character entities for the entire message.
- If there is no punctuation in the source message, don't include 
punctuation in the translation, unless the translation language 
requires it to be present in that context.
- Be sure to remember any special formatting that is required to 
accommodate the punctuation. For example, in French, the message 'Lost 
your password?' is translated as 'Mot de passe oublié ?' (notice the 
space before the question mark), but should be formatted 'Mot de passe 
oublié ?' Notice the use of   (non-breaking space) to 
"join" the question mark with the last word of the sentence, and 
prevent it from wrapping by itself.
- WordPress often uses a right single-quote character (’ as HTML 
character entity ’) for curly apostrophes in its messages. If 
your translated message includes an apostrophe when the source message 
does not, feel free to use the curly apostrophe if you like. Other 
messages should use whichever the source message uses, if the 
translation also has an apostrophe.
- Whenever possible, try to keep the same tone as the source messages. 
The source messages tend to have a politely informal tone. so try to 
keep the translations on the same level of informality, as much as it 
is possible to do so within the cultural context of the language you 
are translating to.

I suppose this list is an appropriate place for questions on how to use 
Rosetta, so if you have any other questions on how to use it, or run 
into difficult-to-translate phrases, feel free to pass them on to the 
list to see if anyone can help out.

Cheers,

Morgan