Translations of Elive

Get Involved UX
23

thanks for the update on the installer messages @triantares :slight_smile: I'm going to rebuild it now so that the automated translations to the other languages will be generated (this is a quite slow step)

By the way @Emil @triantares @TheTechRobo, when fixing / improving the english, make sure you follow the "special english steps" explained in eltrans (hopefully is well explained on eltrans, i remember it was not, in the past), this "reverse-engineered trick" is very important to have elive correctly translated to all the other languages available (note that only a 5% maximum of translations to the other languages are made by the users, the 95% remaining is made by auto-translations, that's why that "reverse engineered step" is very important because we depend on them for its quality)

24

I can see that ....there is a minor point of course in the fact that I only use Dutch as a second language.
Other non-Germanic languages (like Spanish or Italian) might still struggle to translate certain grammar flows. :thinking:

Addendum

I'm hitting a block with the <90% approved texts....Isn't a bit useless to show them if you can't work on them as a translator/proofreader?

25

Yes, I will do my best. If something is inclear, I will ask you.

26

Hi,
Took a look at eltrans and the instructions for English today. Messed around a bit with Google Translate. It's straightforward, but I am not perfectly happy with some results. Personally I find that many messages are too verbose, and in English there are good ways to make sentences shorter and still meaning the same, like for example:

We are assuming that you do not need it anymore.

replaced by:

Assuming that you do not need it anymore.

Google Translate does not recognize it as such. How should I handle something like this? Messages which are too long (albeit in good English and in well-formed sentences) are tedious to read on screen (small font) and take too much time. Therefore I would try and make instrictions and explanations as short as possible.
I am at the installer right now. I imagine that someone who wants to install Elive rather would prefer instructions as brief as possible,so he can get it on the hard disk soon...

And a last question: how do I get translations over to you?

27

Last question is alrady answered - just saw that eltrans is sending in the translations on closing it.

28

this was made basically as a security system (don't allow translations / proofreadings if not enough messages has been validated), validation means something like checking the messages if they are correct, because some of them (like in the installer) are so old that maybe doesn't even make sense so its a kind of review (actually only me is permitted to validate them, if I'm not wrong).

Sometimes the auto-translations are not perfect but we simply should try to match them as best as possible :slight_smile:

Yeah exactly, this is exactly what we need :slight_smile: most of these messages are writer very long time ago (with a much more imperfect english) and includes too much verbosity or not-enough-clear message, making them shorter is in fact very important and wanted (remember that most of people don't read messages, so the longer, the worse), you are more than welcome to make them more shorter, clear, and clever, if they keeps the meaning / message :slight_smile:

I just tried your modified sentence and it translates perfectly well in Spanish: Suponiendo que ya no lo necesites. , but if this happens, you may try with simpler sentences, btw a good tip is to include a "," or a "." in sentences even if is not needed, google translate deals the sentences better on this way (and in the end seemsto be the correct way to write them), some possible examples of alternatives:

You may not need it anymore

Assuming is not anymore needed <--- note the changing of words positions

But in any case, your modified example is correctly translated into Spanish so that sentence looks perfectly good to be used :slight_smile:

... Therefore I would try and make instrictions and explanations as short as possible.

Sure! as said before this is a very good thing to have :slight_smile:

automatically managed from the application :slight_smile: and you can view the changes (and the ones of other's here: Timeline – Elive Development , after that, when the packages are re-built they are included in the new application

IMPORTANT: There's a kind of bug in the tool but is not really a bug and is good to keep them as is: when you improve the english of a sentence, the sentence is inserted (modified) directly on the source code of the app, this makes the translation tools to mark it as a "new sentence" and it shows up as it needs to be validated / approved (fuzzy mode), this is normal and stills good to make them a second review (maybe by another person too), but maybe makes you confused about "why it shows that requires validation if i already send this improved sentence?" :slight_smile: . @Emil, @triantares, @thetechrobo

Hum, it did send correctly your translation? I'm not seeing it on the website... mmh.. Timeline – Elive Development

29

I was going to say that I saw some translations by @triantares, and so I was going to rebuild these packages so that the sentences will be updated and like explained before, they needs to be re-validated from eltrans (so he can easily find them), but the thing is that after the switch to bullseye there's some errors thrown by wrong utf-8 chars, this means that I need to rebuild entirely the pretranslations and this is a really slow step, to make sure all the process is correctly working and we don't have broken / conflicting translations I have create a (temporal) new thread to follow this procedure: https://forum.elivelinux.org/t/translations-fixes/3154

Tip: enter from terminal into your ~/Projects/translations/elive directory and run the command "bkp save" everytime you want to save a snapshot backup, if in any update there's something wrong (like your translations lost / overwritten, which should be not the case) you can easily run "bkp meld" and re-import your modifications, just like seeing graphically what has changed), make sure the file is correctly structured before to save it and send the fix with 'svn commit -m message'

30

I, for the life of me wouldn't know where there could be non-utf-8 chars in the En sentences. :shocked:

31

Hi,
Thank you for all this info. As I said, I was rather playing around with things in order to get an idea of how everything works. I have not changed more than two short sentences which happened to come up on top of the list. If they got lost on the way, who cares...
There is one weak point, though, in the workflow using Google Translate: If you use different languages as a reference (like you with Spanish and me with German), and you get satisfying results with one language and less good ones in another, how can you tell what would be the best solution in English? You often come across words which can have quite a few meanings in one language and quite a few other meanings/connotations in another one. And some words even do not have any exact equivalent in other languages.
Sometimes some kind of complete rewrite would be better (sticking closely to the message to convey, of course), I think, instead of trying to translate more or less literally. Of course you still can try and throw your rewrites at Google Translate :wink:
And then there are all these great idioms which mostly are quite different in other languages like:

"I'll keep my fingers crossed for you"

"Ich drück dir die Daumen" (German)

How does this translate into Spanish?

In the past i have localized another application for a developer to German (he was a native English speaker - that made this part easier), but there I had a lot of trouble shortening my German localisation enough, because most German words just have more letters than their English counterparts, and so sometimes I had to change the sizes of message windows in order to make my text fit :wink:

32

Yeah, that's where a major problem lies. :face_with_head_bandage:

The latter "changed positions sentence" is absolutely faulty English and should NOT be used.

In such a case the 'correct' (as by the original proof reader) must be kept and the native Spanish speaker should repair or reword the shitty Google translation. Which is also coherent with @Emil 's last comment.

So all in all, an original (English) sentence can be modified or simplified by a native speaker to make translation easier for Google translate but never, ever should a Google translate define the original above what the native speaker wrote.

To be real, that last sentence should be:
'Assuming you no longer need it' ... as Google correctly translates from Spanish but 'Assuming it wont be needed any longer' is a better wording.

German is indeed a disaster in it's long windedness compared to other languages, including Dutch. :innocent:

1 Like
33

not sure what caused them but on bullseye i have errors in some (very few) specific lines, like:

desktop health wrapper/hi.po.new:29:349: invalid multibyte sequence
msgattrib: found 1 fatal error

in the "timeline" link nothing shows up as having sent :thinking: can you try again ? (just to make sure that is working, we don't want you to lose real work later :slight_smile: )

it is of course not a perfect method, it just a special trick that greatly improves the translations into the other languages, so basically you need to apply your own criteria :slight_smile: there's an example:

  • originally the nvidia drivers installer included sentences as "free driver", which was very wrongly translated by google (and noticed this thanks to see the results on the google translator), basically it translated to something like "cost-free car-driver" or something similar :crazy_face: , so I was thinking how to replace that to still be correct and make more sense, the result was "open-source driver"

Perfection may not be reached, but we can simply improve the messages as how they actually are :slight_smile:

  1. yes of course :slight_smile:
  2. well the google translate is not only for make the sentences correct in English, but also to (verify that) have by-default better translated to other languages, and, to make sure we are not using wrong words that cannot be translated correctly like the previous example said (another example can be the word "root", we can use instead "administrator account")

very well :slight_smile: from both English and german versions :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: , note also that google translator is a smart translator, so it is not based on "translate words" like old software did in the 90's, but it used the humans to "learn" (by improving the users the translations) how a specific sentence must be translated to make sense, that's why the quality of google translator is so good (generically speaking)

yes it was an example, for me to type in google translator is a good way to "learn better english" too, when i see that is wrongly translated I'm like "oh, there must be something wrong on this sentence on this way" (actually when there's a new message in some source code, its always passed by that verification :slight_smile: )

yeah of course, but note that in most cases google translate should do the work correctly, and if is not the case, maybe something can be changed (that doesn't affects wrongly the correct English i mean), this is especially the case for words like "root" or "free driver" as in the previous examples shown

1 Like
34

Note: I was looking at the changes by @triantares and they are a lot :slight_smile: I think we will have soon the english messages much better! :slight_smile:

But I wanted to note a fewthings (I may should include these in the eltrans UX message suggestions?)

  • IMPORTANT: when there's a %s char in the translations, it is replaced by a variable in the source code, they are also set in order, so is needed to keep the same structure (and order), and to not add or remove any %s one, but if is needed to do these things, you can just tell me so i can update the source code to fit it to the new message, this was in the line 69 of this commit: https://dev.elivecd.org/changeset/5605
  • @triantares @Emil @TheTechRobo : a good tip is to install the browser extension "Grammarly", it checks that your typing text is correctly written and marks them in red or similar when an error is found, sometimes there's an extra "to" word in a sentence or sometimes we miss typos that we simply don't see, like on these generic examples: https://dev.elivecd.org/changeset/5612 and https://dev.elivecd.org/changeset/5617

Extra:

  • more details about the %s way of work:

assume this pseudocode:

hd_partition="sda2"
hd_partition_type="ext4"
printf "your partition '%s' is formated as '%s' \n" "$hd_partition" "$hd_partition_type"

you can copy-paste this code into your terminal and it will work, so you can understand (or play with) to see how the %s values work, for example adding an extra one doesn't lead to any assigned variable, this may make the code not work or simply not show any value for it

  • about Gramarly, some examples:

image

It is of course much more useful for me than for you* :slight_smile: but still fixing typos or be useful for an automated grammar checker

image

35

no

I don't like using closed-source stuff if I can help it.

1 Like
36

Anyways .... is 'gramarly' also an extension for 'eltrans'?
As that's what I use to check the texts.

37

no, its for chrome, all my sentences are copy-pasted on the google-translator window so they are always "Grammarly"-verified automatically there too

38

working on liveboot now, its funny to see how sentences can be shorter with the same message / or removing useless parts :slight_smile:

image

mentions: @Emil

1 Like
39

Mmh, shorter isn't always better.
I would say that the second sentence needs work i.e has a strange flow to it.
I personally would translate that sentence into:

" You have a slow or old computer probably lacking sufficient RAM. If you find Elive sluggish we recommend to try an older version of Elive. The torrents for those can be found on our website."

I think every 'En' translation has to be separately proof read by minimally 2 translators before being set out in the wild. :thinking:

Also take care where to use 'suggest', 'advise' and 'recommend' ....... they are different terms.

40

I've gone over liveboot as well as the other 100% ones.
Of course others should look at them too i.e errors slip in easily and the language already there influences the outcome too ..... and sometimes fatigue simply sets in. :shocked:

41

Tip: @triantares if you don't use grammarly (that's for chrome so is not the way you use it) you can install the myspell-en package so that it will show you in red if there's a typo in the editing window

42

Just a note, I just found this message:

image
image703×131 28.7 KB

Which was corrected wrongly, why is wrong? because this is a question step where it asks the user if wants to remove the package, if user clicks in "OK", the package is removed, so this correction makes it not clear and probably even wrong ("do you want to delete all your hard disk? -> No -> hard disk deleted" lol) :rofl2:

so imagine those scenarios widgets:

  • Do you want to remove pulseaudio? Cancel Ok

  • Do you you want pulseaudio installed or not? Cancel Ok

@TheTechRobo @triantares