Localization and translation

Feeds

22:12

Gilles has added Ninefingers to the list of this room's owners.

Ninefingers

Excellent, here we are

Paŭlo Ebermann

3

Q: Stack Overflow UI Translation via Greasemonkey

What is it? Why this project? Every so often, somebody asks on meta "can we allow foreign language contributions to StackOverflow" and a huge debate ensues. However, once upon a time, somebody observed that in fact no matter which way you look at it the StackExchange UI is in English, and that ...

2

So everyone knows what we are talking about :-)

Gilles

5

Q: Help translate the StackExchange UI (Unofficial)

Earlier this year, I saw a post written by what was then Pekka's trolling account asking what the state of the nation was regarding localisation. Rob replied that localisation was creeping up StackExchange's list of priorities, but they were pretty busy. Now, I saw this post and thought - hey wa...

discussion localization

2

Ninefingers

I take it the room is public so I can link to it on meta?

Gilles

@Ninefingers been there done that

Ninefingers

22:15

@Gilles how on earth do you type so fast! Ok excellent

Paŭlo Ebermann

I didn't yet get it to work in Opera. Maybe I'll have to restart the browser, trying that now.

Ninefingers

Ok so what do we think so far? @Gilles it's enabled for French Language and Usage.

Gilles

@Ninefingers I've managed to translate “asked” but not “edited” or “answered” for some reason

$('.user-action-time').each(function(actiontimebox) {
    str = $(this).html();
    if ((str = str.replace(/^asked /, "posée ")) ||
        (str = str.replace(/^edited /, "éditée ")) ||
        (str = str.replace(/^answered /, "postée "))) {
        $(this).html(str);
    } else {
        $(this).html("posté " + str);
    }
});

Ninefingers

Also, in terms of committing and sorting things out I really don't mind if we use my repository, other people's repositories and if anyone wants to email me changes, I'll try my best to get to them. I check the email that is not my username backwards on my profile more often than sregn... but either is fine.

Gilles

ah ok, it's only the first assignment that triggers

and it's pretty obvious why now that I think about it

Ninefingers

22:23

@Gilles just taking a look myself - it's been a while since I've used js though...!

Paŭlo Ebermann

Okay, one Opera browser-restart is enough.

Would this be easier to translate in multiple languages if we split the logic from the dictionary?

Ninefingers

@PaloEbermann yep - the problem is I started this one night when I felt like fiddling with something, so I haven't got all that serious about it (yet) but yes - it'd kinda be nice to have gettext-like semantics so SE-Inc can see the English bits that are being translated.

Gilles

@PaŭloEbermann Yes

But I think we'll have to fiddle a bit more before we figure out what to separate

Paŭlo Ebermann

Okay, so I'll not yet start to translate to German or Esperanto :-)

Gilles

e.g. I'm already running into gender issues: it's fortunate that question and answer have the same gender in French

Paŭlo Ebermann

22:30

@Gilles (In German, too, and Esperanto has no genders. But no Idea for Japanese.)

Gilles

For some reason, the top links (Questions, Badges, etc.) are getting translated on MSO but not on French

Ninefingers

@Gilles I kinda skipped that :) I started a degree in maths with the french grammar module, but it's been a couple of years since I did that so I'm naturally pretty rusty.

How odd - probably different layout

12

Q: Can anyone recommend a good Hashtable implementation in Javascript?

I've found jCache and some other home-grown methods using associative arrays. If you've had experience with jCache, were there any limitations?

javascript hashtable

for dictionaries. Appropriate naming of a "dictionary" object might work.

Gilles

for tonight I'm concentrating on getting one page to look good

and it's getting dangerously near bedtime

Paŭlo Ebermann

google.com/search?q=gettext+javascript shows some Gettext-implementations in Javascript - maybe we can reuse one of them?

(on the longer term)

Ninefingers

@Gilles it's 23:30 here; but I can check in tomorrow during the day also.

Gilles

22:33

How odd, the HTML says “Membres” (according to Chrome's F12 thingy) but the page shows “Users”

Could that be the CSS's fault?

Ninefingers

@Gilles the html templates are different :(

<div id="hmenus">
<div class="nav mainnavs">
<ul>
<li>
<a id="nav-questions" href="/questions">Questions</a>
</li>
<li>
<li>
<li>
<li>
</ul>
</div>

on french (and presumably other stacks)

<div id="hmenus">
<div class="nav mainnavs">
<ul>
<li>
<a id="nav-questions" href="/questions">Questions</a>
</li>
<li>
<a id="nav-tags" href="/tags">Badges</a>
</li>
<li>
<a id="nav-users" href="/users">Membres</a>
</li>
<li>
<a id="nav-badges" href="/badges">Balises</a>
</li>
<li>
<a id="nav-unanswered" href="/unanswered">Sans réponse</a>
</li>

on SO

Sorry for the wall of code

Gilles

but even then I have <a id="nav-users" href="/users">Membres</a> and yet my browser displays Users

Ninefingers

Hmm; actually, me too.

Paŭlo Ebermann

cdn.sstatic.net/Skins/sketchy/img/sprites-beta.png?v=2

This is the background image used here. We would need to translate this image and use another image instead.

Gilles

@PaŭloEbermann it's an image‽ Ouch!

Paŭlo Ebermann

22:39

This is known as CSS sprite sheet, I suppose.

Ninefingers

That's how they get the splodge background thing to work - by moving the right part of the image underneath the text using css. Ok - so, do we work around it with our own image, or do we just ignore it for now as something we can't change?

There were always going to be bits like this.

Paŭlo Ebermann

I would say "ignore for now, think about image-less solution later" :-)

Or a solution where only the yellow background stuff is from the image, and actual text is text.

Ninefingers

22:54

Hello @RobertHarvey!

Ok so GreaseMonkey, Firebug and NoScript aren't playing nicely together; I might have to debug this on chrome instead.

Gilles

@Ninefingers I've added a couple of translations, can I email them to you?

Subject: [PATCH] Extended to all SE sites; added some translations

* Apply the translation to all Stack Exchange sites (SO, SU, SF, AU, SA,
*.SE, and metas).
* Added a few more translations (still very much work in progress).

Ninefingers

@Gilles by all means

Gilles

@Ninefingers sent

I hope I got it right, I'm a beginner with git

Ninefingers

@Gilles which email did you send it to? There's my actual name and then theres my screen name backwards; depending on where I'm signing up I use different ones. I don't use my actual email in git either, just to be awkward, mostly cause I figured it would be automatically visible in any mailing lists/patches and I get enough spam as it is!

Gilles

23:09

@Ninefingers I sent it to the one in the git logs

Ninefingers

@Gilles ah yep, got it, that one's fine too

@Gilles Humm it doesn't want to do that at all - it just errors. It might be easier to email me git diff HEAD^..HEAD > gilles_changes - I'm not all that great with git's email features myself!

@Gilles alternatively, stick a repository up on github... I can then merge/pull from you that way

Gilles

@Ninefingers I'll do that, but not tonight

Ninefingers

@Gilles ok no problem, time for me to sleep anyway. I'll merge in by hand the changes you've sent me for now so they'll be in master at some point tomorrow AM.

Ok I figured out the problem - I've merged it.

Paŭlo Ebermann

23:39

I'll esplore how one could use some JS gettext library ... but not today. Here the links so I'll not forget them: jsgettext.berlios.de/doc/html/Gettext.html, code.google.com/p/gettext-js/wiki/MainDocumentation

3

Ninefingers

Ok we should probably rename the script from SO to StackExchange too... but hey. Bed time. Night all.

Paŭlo Ebermann

Good night!

Transcript for

Localization and translation