New translation infrastructure?

haraldkliems
In my efforts to update and extend the German pages in the wiki, I recently went to Babelzilla to look something up. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts to find the Zotero page, I finally discovered the terse announcement in the discussion thread that Zotero had been removed from Babelzilla and was moving to a different translation infrastructure. I haven't been able to find any further info on this and was wondering if someone from the Zotero team could say something about it.

Frankly speaking, I find it a bit rude to just remove the extension from the current localization system without notifying the translators and without providing any further information. That being said, Babelzilla was far from perfect and I'm looking forward to a new and improved system to contribute my localizations to.

Harald.
  • ajlyon
    After a couple of unsuccessful attempts to find the Zotero page, I finally discovered the terse announcement in the discussion thread that Zotero had been removed from Babelzilla and was moving to a different translation infrastructure.
    Is this really the case? I know that there was discussion of moving to a new system, but I didn't think that that had happened yet. Can you link to the relevant discussion?
  • dstillman
    We removed it. The translator community on BabelZilla is wonderful, but dealing with BZ was an incredibly frustrating and time-consuming process. We're building a very simple system that works around the unbearableness of BZ (which, to be fair, is due in part to limitations in the Mozilla localization system—if Firefox supported an automatic fallback to a specified locale in the case of missing strings it would make the entire process so much easier). The new system isn't ready, but it hopefully will be soon.

    And leaving an out-of-date version of Zotero up there for localization when we may not be able to use new translations seemed like the rude course of action.
  • haraldkliems
    http://www.babelzilla.org/forum/index.php?s=&showtopic=2328&view=findpost&p=56572

    The post is pretty recent (09/16).

    Harald.
  • ajlyon
    I suppose I was thinking only of the Zotero forums. Hopefully this doesn't lose too many people in the confusion of a migration. It will be nice to have the localization part of the community in closer contact with the rest of the people involved in development and troubleshooting here on the main forums.
  • haraldkliems
    edited September 21, 2010
    Ah, Dan beat me with his comment. Thanks for the update and I can only agree with your assessment of Babelzilla. Good luck with coming up with a good alternative!

    Harald.

    PS My point about rudeness was not about abandoning Babelzilla, but doing so without telling anyone in advance/after the fact. I spent a good twenty minutes trying to find Zotero on the WTS, and sending out a BZ message to the translator community would have been easy. But if you'll develop a better localization system, I'll happily forgive you :-)

    PPS I linked to this discussion from the BZ Zotero thread.
  • Gracile
    As HobbesvsBoyle, I was very surprised. But I hope to see the new translation system soon!
  • unhammer
    Anyone know if it is up yet? I'd very much like to know if anyone else is working on Norwegian Nynorsk (if not I might work on a conversion from the Bokmål at http://github.com/unhammer/zotero-nn until it's up)
  • dittaeva
    A Norwegian Nynorsk (nn-NO) translation based on the Norwegian Bokmål (nb-NO) translation is now ready at the above URL (files ending with .u). Could you please implement it / use it for the next release?

    Or should we mail a tarball or zip to someone?
  • dstillman
    edited October 13, 2010
    Committed (untested) on the trunk and branch. You can try it in the latest 2.0 Branch dev XPI.

    Note that you didn't provide a locales.xml translation for bibliography localization. (And the 2.0 branch version is separate, but there may or may not be another 2.0 release anyway.)
  • RintzeRintze
    For the CSL localization files, it might be handier to use those found in the CSL locales repository: http://bitbucket.org/bdarcus/csl-locales/wiki/Home
  • dittaeva
    edited October 13, 2010
    Rintze: didn't read your comment before translating. The translations will be uploaded to githug by unhammer shortly, but we can use bitbucket for future versions. I expect you'll make it available there. Please change name of nb-NO to Norwegian Bokmål, BTW, that's the most correct way to write it and Nynorsk and Bokmål "are equal".
  • unhammer
    I reorganised the files a bit at http://github.com/unhammer/zotero-nn to make it a bit simpler.

    The files in that directory contain the nn translations (no ".u" now), please ignore the "unknown-word-marked" dir.

    Also:

    http://github.com/unhammer/zotero-nn/tree/master/nb/

    contains an updated locales-nb-NO.xml courtesy of dittaeva.
  • unhammer
    By the way, are the CSL files in bitbucket just meant to replace locales-[langcode].xml ?
  • unhammer
    Also, a more on-topic question: Any chance you'll move to gettext files? Those dtd/properties files are not very well suited for translation (especially since they don't contain the original text, meaning it's hard to tell automatically whether something has actually been translated); also there are a wide range of gettext-GUI's for translators and translation memory systems (poedit, virtaal, lokalize, pology, etc.).

    If po-files have no direct integration in Firefox, it should still be possible to gettextify the dtd/properties files, so translators use po-files while some scripts turn them into Firefox-readable files (more or less a matter of replacing the English string with _(string) in the .dtd files and running them through php or something...)
  • RintzeRintze
    are the CSL files in bitbucket just meant to replace locales-[langcode].xml?
    Other projects also use CSL, so the CSL Locales Bitbucket repository is meant as the main repository for the locale files.

    Also, are you sure periods have been added to abbreviations (if required), as discussed in the translation instructions I linked to above?
  • unhammer
    They were added to some but not all, fixed them now.
  • meelis.friedenthal
    I just recently finished the Estonian translation (for the second time, to be honest, last time in connection with an update the translations got quite mysteriously lost and nor I or anyone else was able to recover them from the babelzilla system). In the current Zotero (2.0.9) the broken translation is used - I would be actually interested to get the revised translation in. Somehow I was having the impression that this would be pulled automatically from babelzilla, seems that this is not the case. How should I proceed?
  • RintzeRintze
    @meelis.friedenthal: if you can make the translated files available online, Dan Stillman might be able to commit them to the SVN repository (see his post above WRT the Norwegian locales). If you can't figure out how to do this, feel free to email me.

    @unhammer: I committed the locale files to the Bitbucket repository: http://bitbucket.org/bdarcus/csl-locales/changeset/033f1c17e285 . Note that I made some minor edits ("ibid.", "s.v." and "s.vv." are abbreviations and require periods; the plural of "sub verbo" is "sub verbis"; the short form of "mai" had a period in the nn-NO locale, which I removed). Otherwise, great job!

    P.S. Please start a new thread for further comments about specific translations.
  • dstillman
    Estonian localization checked in on the trunk.

    https://www.zotero.org/trac/changeset/7272

    Thanks.
  • RintzeRintze
    @Gracile, @dittaeva and @unhammer: your French and Norwegian (Nynorsk and Bokmål) translations of the CSL locale files have found their way into Zotero 2.1b3.
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