Translations for Cloudron

[thetomester13]

When this is ready I can contribute Hebrew translations if we plan to support RTL languages!

[jimcavoli]

I've submitted several suggestions for the Italian translation - is that an okay way to go or should I stop doing that for a bit?

[nebulon]

I would prefer to still hold off a bit on suggestions as I am still building up those translation keys and thus I won't accept them yet. Once this stabilizes I am an not sure if it would then make sense to open up registration for our weblate instance so we can have a non anonymous discussion on translation strings, which I would prefer.

[jeau]

Thank you for this work. When it will be stabilized, I will be available to contribute to the French translation.

[jimcavoli]

Just wanted to mention how much I love the fact that even before being 100% ready to process contributed translations that we've got commitments on at least 5 languages! That's awesome. It would be good perhaps for those of us that use the product and can contribute any translation to set some goals for completing those that we can get started. So by my count so far, we've got people ready to work on:

• de
• fr
• it
• nl (not in weblate yet)
• es (not in weblate yet)
• he (not in weblate yet, RTL)

Big ones there are definitely going to be easy to complete look like de, es, and fr, which, considering en is already in the mix, probably covers at least one language of most of our user base. I wonder if we could dig up some folks to tackle any of hi, zh, ja, and ar since those would all be potentially valuable places to have native-language support, with large populations and well-developed internet access. I am uniquely un-qualified to work any of those, however.

Couple useful resources/citations on expansion:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers (somewhat better than above; includes portions of that data as well)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes

[rmdes]

@nebulon I can give a hand on French, Portuguese

[nebulon]

This is a good point about the languages we want to support. From our side we can only do English and German and parts Italian. My leftover French from school is probably not gonna help much

Currently there are about 900 strings to translate, quite a few are the same, but we kept the translation IDs distinct for the future, weblate should propose translations though if similar.

From what I can tell here, there are enough people willing to help on the French, Dutch and maybe Spanish (either way I think Spanish is very important) translation, so the list currently is:

• English (en)
• German (de)
• French (fr)
• Italian (it)
• Spanish (es)
• Dutch (nl)

Please speak up here if you want to help out in any other language and I will update the above list.

[marcusquinn]

@eriktad perhaps something we could seed populate for all languages with our translation engine? (900 words wouldn't cost anything)

[imc67]

@nebulon said in Translations for Cloudron:

Dutch

I can do the Dutch version!

[ei8fdb]

Edit: I've modified the link below as it seems the embedded is being blocked

@girish @nebulon If it helps, I've put this quick survey together to gather some quant data for languages spoken:

https://saneuxdesign.survey.fm/what-languages-are-spoken-by-cloudron-users

If your language is not listed there, you can add it in the "other" field. If there's a need I'll update the list with new languages.

The data can be shared publicly to give an idea of %'s of languages spoken.

[nebulon]

@ei8fdb I seem to be getting a :Page Not Found" in the iframe there?

[girish]

@ei8fdb I installed the poll plugin on this forum for you if you want to give it a try (make a separate post somwhere). This is the plugin I installed - https://github.com/NodeBB/nodebb-plugin-poll . There is a button in the new post dialog (looks like a graph), if you click it, it brings up a poll window.

[ei8fdb]

@girish Thanks for doing that. I did try it - the only issue is the poll doesn't have an option for the participant to an other option, and so all languages would need to be listed from the beginning.

(I've changed the link abive to link directly to the survey)

[ei8fdb]

Results so far:

If you'd like to contribute your answer, you can fill out the 2 question survey.

[ei8fdb]

@girish @nebulon These are the results so far. There's been no new data since the Nov 19th.

I'll leave the survey open in case more people reply.

Hope that's useful!

[nebulon]

@ei8fdb thanks that is useful. We will ship Cloudron 6 with only English and German as fully translated. This is only because those are the languages we at Cloudron speak
However once version 6 is out, it supports downloading new languages and translations without update, so essentially once a Cloudron is then updated to version 6 then everyone can help out with translation for the rest

[imc67]

@nebulon can we already start with translating as it might take some time? (Dutch/nl)

[luckow]

To give an idea: the whole translation is done while playing a 10 episode netflix series. After this process you need 3 times 2 hours to make the translation consistent and correct your own typos.

If you want to translate in a team, start with guidelines.For German we have decided to translate according to these guidelines:

• be inclusive & friendly
• avoid to gender. try to find better terms
• if gender is needed use the "*" format
• only translate widly used tech terms. if there is no, don't translate
• in the german language we make a difference between formal and informal salutation. Try to avoid direct salutation.
• put often used terms in the glossary
• as long as necessary but short in focus

[ei8fdb]

@nebulon Glad it's useful.

We will ship Cloudron 6 with only English and German as fully translated. This is only because those are the languages we at Cloudron speak

Yup that makes sense.

However once version 6 is out, it supports downloading new languages and translations without update

Great, and the translations will be managed on weblate? I'd like to help with Spanish localisation.

[ei8fdb]

Thanks @luckow these are good recommendations and advice about the process, particularly:

• be inclusive & friendly
• avoid to gender. try to find better terms. if gender is needed use the "*" format

I am not familar with * format?

• in the german language we make a difference between formal and informal salutation. Try to avoid direct salutation

This does bring up a question: what tone does Cloudron.io want Cloudron to have? Serious? Scary? Helpful? Friendly?

• as long as necessary but short in focus

this can be hard

Doing localisation so everybody can understand is a whole expertise in itself - I am not an expert, but I do try to contribute from the users perspective, and it's important to remember that not all Cloudron users are technology professionals!

It is also important to mention - in some languages there are no words for concepts like security/privacy/encryption - these are not cultural concepts. For the first first languages, this probably won't be a big issue.

Here is a set of glossaries created by Localisation Lab, a great organisation who do localisation work for a lot of open source projects and "technical" projects with their community of native speakers.

https://www.localizationlab.org/glossaries

It has glossaries for many "technical" terms in many languages, for example in Spanish:

attachment - adjunto
database - base de datos
decryption - descifrado
default server - Servidor predeterminado

Here are the glossaries for:
Spanish, French, and Dutch.