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Conventions for translations
The following update was made during the R Project Sprint 2023, Warwick and Online (hybrid) during 30 Aug - 1 Sept 2023:
- Unless having very strong reasons not to, please follow your language specific glossary and guidelines
- If you encounter ambiguous or difficult strings to translate that aren't captured in the language specific glossary and guidelines, refer to the core-translation slack channel to discuss it with other translators
- Some languages, like spanish, have specific channels to discuss translation. Refer to your specific channel to discuss issues related to your language: if you need a slack channel set up for a language, send a direct slack message to @mcnanton To be discussed:
- put policies like not work on new translations, don’t retranslate of something new, start with reviews
- put as a suggestion and not submit, needs editing.
- accept the default suggested translations, if it makes sense
- Weblate has features to flag untranslatable and forbidden terms (see https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/user/glossary.html)
- check what they do for Python
- argument (write in translated language) or vice versa (original term in brackets)
- keyboard keys
- function names
- %s, %d
- put on wiki
Process to be defined
| Language | Team Leaders (Contributor/Translator/Dedicated Reviewer) |
|---|---|
| Arabic | Iman Al-Hasani, Abdulrahman Alswaji |
| Bengali | Debartha Paul |
| Brazilian-Portugese | Caio Lente, Renata Hirota |
| Hindi | Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal, Ayush Patel |
| Japanese | Reiko Okamoto |
| Nepali | Binod Jung Bogati |
| Spanish | Geraldine Gómez, María Nanton, Macarena Quiroga |
Saranjeet wanted to know how to handle translating strings such as "Keyboard: PgUp, PgDown, Ctrl+Arrows, Ctrl+Home, Ctrl+End". She has currently translated to Hindi as "कीबोर्ड: पेज अप, पेज डाउन, कंट्रोल+एरोज , कंट्रोल+होम , कंट्रोल+एन्ड ,", which is in Hindi script but is spoken the same as the English words, since these are imported/foreign words.
We looked at how other languages translate this string using the "Other languages" button on Weblate: https://translate.rx.studio/translate/r-project/base-r-gui/hi/?checksum=05ce1e10588b237c&sort_by=-priority,position#translations
- French translates all the keys apart from those that are in English on a French keyboard: "Clavier : PageHaut, PageBas, Ctrl+Flèches, Ctrl+Début, Ctrl+Fin," According to Hugo: "keys that are translated in a French keyboard: del, end, screenshot, insert. I believe that other keys usually don't include text but use symbols (arrows, shift, pgup, pgdown). Ctrl and Alt are not translated". It looks like Chinese takes a similar approach.
- Italian does not translate the keys: "Tastiera: PgUp, PgDown, Ctrl+Arrows, Ctrl+Home, Ctrl+End,". Most languages take this approach.
- Best to discuss among translation team for specific language if possible, to decide best approach. General guidance: don't translate unless these terms are commonly translated on the keyboard, commonly used in other technical documentation, or are simply a translation of the English word into the language script. (The latter advice because if people are choosing to see R messages in a non-English language, they may prefer to see everything in that script where possible).
Suggested each team maintains a page on this wiki https://github.com/r-devel/translations where they note agreed conventions for future contributors/translators.