Czech translation of OS page

[skurut]

Hello,

I translated the http://os.wildfiregames.com/ page.

When you are going to start localizing the game, I will gladly help a bit. I work as project manager in a translation agency and have been translating a little bit too. Although I don't have experience with open source software localization processes, I believe I can still be of help with my experience from the translation/localization industry (though lack of free time will probably be a little obstacle).

Moreover I studied history and classical archaeology on a university, specializing in Roman warfare, so I think I have some background in ancient history, etc. that may be helpful.

index.cs.html

[Ykkrosh]

Thanks, uploaded here.

That sounds like useful experience! I think there's three main things we currently need: more stable textual content (so there's enough to be worth translating and so it won't all become obsolete a few months later), technical work to support translations (extracting strings from the game, making the engine use the translated strings), and organisation and management (getting volunteers to do the work and merging it all and checking quality and getting it updated for new releases etc). The first part might take another six months or so (though that's just a wild guess); the second part would probably be fairly quick once we know what tools we want to use (but we don't know yet and don't have any experience to decide what's good). The third part I have absolutely no idea about.

So the plans are currently quite flexible/incomplete, and there's a lot of opportunity/work here - if you have suggestions for how we could get a good translation system running, that'd be very helpful . I don't think we're doing anything unique here, so we should just build on experience from other games and from other translation work and try to make something good.

[Belisarivs]

Heya.

I'm still here around. Watching and admiring your progress.

I am de facto leader of Czech KDE localization team with commit access rights.

If gettext is planned to be used for translations, I'm experienced more than enough to work on that (that doesn't mean, that any help wouldn't be welcome, though ).

[skurut]

Hello,

Sorry for the later reply. Well, I have experience more with coordinating translators and related stuff. To be honest I don't know much about extracting of software strings, versioning and generally about the developer's/programmer's point of view. So I guess such things and subsequent organisation would depend on discussion.

With regard to the translation software, I've been looking around a little bit and it seems that the most advanced open source CAT tool is OmegaT. In comparison with commercial tools it has many shortcomings, it also has a few unpleasant bugs and needs some tweaking, but it can handle the most important formats (including gettext files), works with translation memories and glossaries, it's free and platform independent (written in Java).

For organization and management of translation work I really do not know. But quite some open source projects are using Pootle, so perhaps this may be one option (allegedly it can export files for OmegaT and it is also possible to translate online, but I have absolutely no experience with this software).

Oh, and I noticed that unfortunately I did not use the correct link to IRC in my translation of the OS page (there's still the old irc://irc.quakenet.org/wfg ). Could you please update this?

Thank you.

[Belisarivs]

Hm.

I wonder why there is not Lokalize in list.

I use it and it works quite well. Together with KDE internal automated syntax check tool Pology.

[skurut]

Hi,

Well, Localize is another CAT tool, similar to OmegaT. Nevertheless from what I've found on the internet, OmegT seems more advanced to me. But may be I'm wrong. I haven't found many information about Localize. The documentation is quite brief (at least the one I have found).

What file formats does Localize support? It seems that it supports .po files and xlif format. Any other? OmegaT has the advantage that it can directly handle a number of important file formats. In OmegaT you can edit segmentation rules. Is this possible in Localize? OmegaT can work with dictionaries in StarDict format. OmegaT integrates some machine translation engines. Localize doesn't seem to do the same. There would be some other features/questions we could talk about, but it's not necessary now. Generally it seems to me that OmegaT offers more features and is more customisable. Probably (although I'm not sure here) it also supports more file formats.

Therefore I preferred OmegaT. I may be wrong, of course. If you can point me to some extensive documentation of Localize, that would be great.

Edited October 30, 2010 by skurut