Collaborative Translation of XBMC Language Files on Launchpad or similar online tool?
#1
Lightbulb 
I have been involved in translating and introducing XBMC to Korean for a while.
I think maintaining language xml of XBMC have been worked ok not great.
Collaborative translation will be more effective way for many reasons.

I have seen XBMC-Linux has been hosted in Launchpad, works well. Why not use their system to translate and maintain the XBMC language files. It will be easier to people want to translate and work together. The Lauchpad has a great system for collaborative translation. You can take a look at the Ubuntu translation section.

https://translations.launchpad.net/ubunt...lang/en_GB

All we need to is opening the translation section of existing XBMC-Linux project and upload the language file to there, not just main language files but also many skins and plugins like Aeon Stark. It is amazing how quickly people gathered for many languages.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=47107


One technical difficulty for this is that XBMC use xml format for language file but lauchpad need to use po file format. I think it can be solved with xml2po utility. I have not tested but should work.

http://man.root.cz/1/xml2po/

Let's make XBMC more international people friendly, I love to see more people use XBMC. Also please take a look at my suggestion on international friendly features and support it.

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=45918
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#2
Another nice way of doing things would be to use the open language tools, based on Xliff: https://open-language-tools.dev.java.net/

@+,
Sha!
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#3
XBMC already have the translational tool. There is not much benefit to use Xliff which is not even fully standardized yet. It is not matter of which tool use, I want have a platform which people can collaborate on XBMC translation.
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#4
+1 for collaborative translation
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#5
rwparris2 and me are in the progress of making that happen, just need to finish the conversion script we wrote.
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#6
blittan Wrote:rwparris2 and me are in the progress of making that happen, just need to finish the conversion script we wrote.
What else needs to be done?
PM with any details, I forgot what was wrong with it.
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#7
Wow, what a wonderful and quick move !
This will definitely help to improve and maintain language files.
Thanks for making this happen, blittan and rwparris2.
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#8
Wow!
Thats great indeed.
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#9
+1 :d
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#10
i hope its finish before 9.04 release. Big Grin
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#11
Any news?
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#12
Hi,

Is Launchpad translation active? or When activated?
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#13
Not yet, will be soon. Just have some minor tweeks to sort out.

I will also set up a translationservice on launchpad for scripts/plugins/skins aswell.
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#14
Hello,

Today I looked at how translations are done in XBMC.
Correct me if wrong, but right now we need to:
-Download language files
-Change them with translation tool
-Upload them on track.

Am I the only one who finds this a crappy process?
I mean, there has to be a way to make this easier.

I was thinking of a web interface.
That way you give everybody authority to be working on the same file, maybe with a voting system when there are multiple translation possibilities.
There could be authorized translators who's changes go directly to SVN. New translators need to be reviewed by authorized translators.

It would be totally awesome if this then could be integrated with svn and if add-ons could be translated the same way.


If people like the idea I'm willing to code this myself.
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#15
I suggest checking out how other projects do it. There are already interfaces available via launchpad or similar I think, so it makes sense to take advantage of these. Essentially all that is required is to convert our language files into the required form so that the web translation services can be used, and convert back out of it. Coding up this side of it would be most welcome.

We have multiple things to translate:

1. Main strings (strings.xml in the language folder in SVN).
2. Addon strings (addons/resources/language/<lang>/strings.xml) in the addons git.
3. Addon descriptions (descriptions.xml for each addon).

We could perhaps look at making part of 3 autogenerated from 2 should it simplify things further and/or moving the language packs themselves to be addons so that we can consolidate all things french etc.

Cheers,
Jonathan
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