[wp-polyglots] Hindi Localization

[Samuel Murray (Groenkloof)]

G'day Jai

Jai Pandya wrote:

> (a) For the first one, initially even I thought about it ( if fact, I 
> had the illusion that some team would be working for hindi Localization 
> of WordPress ).

I was actually thinking more along the lines that you could ask for help 
from people who had once shown an interest in similar projects.  All the 
items in my previous mail are content management systems similar to 
WordPress.  The people who translated those or who were interested in 
translating it, may be good candidates for putting together a team to 
translate WordPress into Hindi.  The same principle applies to any 
language, I think.

> Traditionally hindi 
> has a problem of standardization. Because of the same problem, we get 
> many localized terms for the same term in english.

The same can be said of my own language, Afrikaans.  I do find, however, 
that other translators sometimes come up with creativity that didn't 
occur to me, so even though I may not have any use for their 
translations, I do find some value in it.

> How is that pre-translation done? Is that a kind of automatic process?

Well, I'm sure there are many pre-translation systems, but the one I'm 
familiar with is the Translate Toolkit's pot2po tool.  It's a bit geeky 
but the tool finds possible translations for your current project by 
searching existing translations of the same project, similar projects or 
even unrelated projects.

When I discovered the Hindi translation of EzPublish, I was quite 
excited, but it turns out that only about 200 of the strings in 
EzPublish are similar to strings in WordPress, so it wouldn't save you a 
lot of time.

The toolkit procedure is this:
1. Rename your file (eg wordpress_hi.po) to wordpress_hi.pot
2. Do this command:
pot2po --tm=ezpublish.po -i wordpress_hi.pot wordpress_hi.po
3. Continue translating wordpress_hi.po

http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/po2tmx
http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/toolkit/pot2po

When I read your original mail, I had the impression that you'd be 
starting from scratch.  This pre-translation is good for folks starting 
from scratch.  For experienced translators, however, you'll have to 
decide for yourself how much value it has.

You can also use the Gnome, KDE and Mozilla translations all in one 
swoop, but if you're interested, you can contact me offline -- I don't 
want folks to say I'm hijacking this mailing list :-)

> This standard glossary for hindi words is 
> made by the active contributors for different open source projects and 
> hindi language experts. ... I have been consulting the 
> terms given there for this Localization effort for WordPress.

Personally I find that it is often useful to add to one's glossary as 
you go along with the translation.

I've tried to create a glossary for WordPress that contains the 100 most 
commonly used words in it, in the hope that it may be useful for 
translators to translate it first.
http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/decathlon/wordpress
(click on "WordPress glossary for Pootle")

What would be nice, though, is to get a glossary of typical blogging 
terms.  I mean, even if these terms are used only once or twice in the 
translation, if they are blogging-specific terms, it may be useful for 
translators to research them beforehand.

There is such a blogging term list here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_blogging_terms
...but those terms are mainly the types of terms you'd find in the media 
when they speak about blogging; they are not terms you'd typically find 
as part of a blogging user interface, which is what we need.

> I'm grateful to you that you spent so much of your time for me.

I'm sure the ideas we discuss can be useful for all WordPress translators.

> One more thing, I am using poEdit for my work, but sometimes when 
> translating plural terms, it shows some kind of error. Also, It has 
> crashed many times.

I'm not that familiar with PoEdit, although I'm on the PoEdit mailing 
list and I can recommend it.  It is an active list and the developers 
are also on the list:

https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/poedit-users

> Do you suggest anything else would be better, or should I 
> continue with the same software?

You should use what you feel comfortable with.  Me, I use mostly 
non-free commercial professional translation tools (which I combine with 
free tools such as the Translate Toolkit to get ultimate productivity).

I'm also an admin at a Pootle server, in case you want to use that.

Sincerely
Samuel


-- 
Samuel Murray
samuel at translate.org.za
Decathlon, for volunteer opensource translations
http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/decathlon/