Slovenian LoCo on a translation spree, again.

Three days ago, still unofficial, Slovenian LoCo members occupied our local hackerspace, Cyberpipe and went on an another translation spree. Our second Ubuntu Global Jam was in a full effect and our goals were simple:

• translate as much as possible
• verify and correct existing translations
• discuss and improve existing Slovene computer terminology
• help anyone who might drop by with Ubuntu problems

Altogether around fifteen people showed up and we had an average of six people translating and helping with terminology. Few interesting debates around localization and differnet translations came up during the event and we had a lot of fun translating all the weather related terms. In the end we decided to pull some strings at the Slovenian Environment Agency and ask if they could help translate some of the strings because we had no idea what is the difference between light rain, light drizzle, rain and drizzle and how they are called in Slovene. ;)

In the end, there were more than 2000 strings translated and verified and again we reached the goal and Oneiric will be 100% translated to Slovene language. Translations / Person ratio was a little better than on our previous Jam where fifteen people translated 4000 strings.

Because not all of us are good at translating, one certain individual was hacking on Gwibber all day and night. Which resulted in support for sending Direct Messages in Gwibber and a prettier presentation of private streams. Few pictures from the event and the working prototype of Gwibber hack are below.

Schedule for Slovenian translation maraton (Ubuntu Global Jam)

Hello!

On Saturday, 2010-04-02, Slovenian Ubuntu translation team is organizing a translation marathon as a part of Ubuntu Global Jam.

We will meet at Kiberpipa, Kersnikova 6, Ljubljana, Slovenia at 9 am. Schedule for the event is:

• 9.00-9.15 gathering
• 9.15-10.00 first translation session
• 9.30-10.00 (optional) short translation (basic grammar, vocabulary) introduction and Launchpad introduction for newcomers
• 10.00-10.15 first break (coffee tea, cookies, discussions)
• 10.15-11.00 second translation session
• 11.00-11.15 second break (coffee tea, cookies, discussions)
• 11.15-12.00 third translation session
• 12.00-12.15 third break (coffee tea, cookies, discussions)
• 12-15-13.00 fourth translation session
• 13.00-14.00 lunch break (sandwiches, discussion about cooperation among translation groups, common vocabulary, communication and other)
• 14.00-14.45 fifth translation session
• 14.45-15.00 break (coffee tea, cookies, discussions)
• 15.00-15.45 sixth translation session
• 15.45-16.00 break (coffee tea, cookies, discussions)
• 16.00-16.45 seventh translation session
• 16.45-17.00 cleaning up
• 17.00-? end of official translation marathon. We head off for some pizza and maybe also somewhere else, depending on the mood.

Our primary goal is to translate some untranslated bits and to do a massive translation bug hunt ever to ensure user experience in Slovenian language is going to rock in Natty. You can contribute by translating (don't worry about your language skills, we will review every sting before it's included in Natty). If you feel more confident you can review translations made by others.

It's often difficult to figure out where strings will appear in the program and hence be certain translation is correct. We need brave and adventurous users, who don't mind running Ubuntu 11.04 beta (if you are not one of them, you can still run it from USB flash drive) to run programs included in Ubuntu be default and check if everything looks OK.

Members of other translation groups are also coming, so this will be great opportunity to meet them, ask them questions or even join their team.

Furthermore a couple of programmers are also coming, so you can come and join them in reporting, or if you are a programmer yourself, fixing bugs too. Running Ubuntu 11.04 beta is recommended in that case. For new bughunters a short lesson how to effectively report bugs in Launchpad will be given.

Finally you can also come to keep us company, encourage us and meet us. You don't have to stay for the whole day if you don't have time. You can only come for a couple of hours if that suits you better.

Please let us know if you plan to come on andrej.znidarsic@ubuntu.com (We would like to know approximately how many people are planning to come to prepare tables and chairs and get an appropriate amount of food and drinks).

If you cannot get to Ljubljana for any reason join as on #ubuntu-si on freenode and you will find more information how to contribute there.

Join us and lets make Slovenian translations rock even harder in Natty!

Training session for Slovenian Ubuntu translation maraton

On April 2nd 2011 Slovenian translation team is organizing Ubuntu translation marathon.

We will focus on detailed check and fixes of strings in all default programs in Ubuntu 11.04 and also translate the strings, which are not translated yet. The schedule is not final yet, but we expect to have 7 translation & review sessions of 45 minutes length.

As we are expecting new contributors will be interested to join the effort to make quality and quantity of Slovenian translations in Natty the best ever, we are organizing two training sessions in our chatroom for you to grasp the basics of both launchpad workflow and some basic rules to ensure high quality of our work.

First training session is today, 21.3 at 20.00 CET and the second one is on 30.3 at 20.00 CET. Training session includes short introduction to work in Launchpad and some peculiarities of Slovenian grammar and vocabulary, translation of the first few strings together and then Q&A session to answer all your questions.

If you are busy at that time you can drop by at any time. Most likely you will find somebody, who will be able to help you out. Before you attend the session we recommend that you read brief guide, so we will be able to proceed faster.

You can join our chatroom by adding the following contact to your Gmail/Jabber account (without the ") "slovenski-prevajalci@partychapp.appspotchat.com". That's it!

Join us and let's make 11.04 best Ubuntu release to date together!

Year 2010 in review for slovenian translation team

New year is great time to look in the past, reflect upon the work done, see what's been done, congratulate oneself for that, make plans and bravely start a new year.

We are sharing this with all of you because:

• We are deeply proud on our achievements
• We would like to get comments from other teams as well (how did you experience 2010 - share it on your blog or in the comments)

As mentioned before year 2010 was really amazingly awesome for Slovenian translation team!

Detailed description below is mostly talking about work done in launchpad and gnome translation project as those are the most important for ubuntu distribution:

• We finished the translation of gnome-extra section. We were actively maintaining the translations throughout 2010 so you were able to some something like the image below for most of 2010:

• We also managed to finish most of the GUI translations. We are still missing a bit of gnome-office and external dependencies. We hope to complete it fully in 2011.

• Together with other translation groups we have managed to accept first version of word list, which contained about 300 terms. It's been constantly updating and growing throughout the year. Current version contains close to 900 terms.
• After the first version of word list, which solved some terminology disagreements we reviewed all (285 .po files in total) translated gnome packages and removed a mountain of inconsistencies, which have lingered around since the beginning of translation effort around the year 2000.
• In a similar way we have reviewed important non-gnome packages in uubuntu. As a result Ubuntu 10.10 is by far the most terminologically consistent release so far.
• Updated and improved translations were (sometimes with a lot of effort) sent back to upstream (translation project, pulseaudio, debian). This means translations will be available to other distributions and operating systems as well.
• To improve translation quality we have split into translation and reviewer group.
• We have rearranged our wiki page and moved it to lugos (Linux User Groups Of Slovenia) website.
• We wrote the guides for poedit and lokalize.
• Established our own chatroom.
• We started writing this blog :)
• We have been actively searching for new translators. Number of moderately active translators  (karma above 500) has increased from 6 (August 2010) to 17 (December 2010). 
• Total karma has jumped from 30 000 (August 2010) to 48 500 (December 2010).
• This enabled us to translate a lot of new packages and increase translation level of default GUI in  Ubuntu from 84 % in 10.04 to 99 % v 10.10. This just placed us withing top 10 languages worldwide  (Slovenian is 178. language in the world by the number of native speakers).
• Translated some 30 smaller programs in launchpad, such as ubuntu tweak, awn, supertuxkart chromium browser, etc.
• Translated GCompris, an educational suite for kids (including with more than 100 sound instructions). 
• Started regular montly meetings in the chatroom (online) 
• Started drinking tasty cool translators beer monthly :) (if my phone's flash wouldn't be horrible, I could show you a nice photo here :( )
• With Firefox plugin EH-Tip created a tool, which enables us easy integration of or word list into launchpad. Several other teams have expressed interest to implement it into their workflow too.
• Had an awesome time doing it :)
• KDE translation team has also been active and in 2010 managed to maintain the translations and add about 7000 newly translated string.
• Growth in 2010 for Slovenian Gnome and KDE translation proejct is shown on the graph below  (y axies is the number of total translated strings - application and documentation):

However we still left some nice challanges for 2011 :). So if you want to help us out and make 2011 equally or even more awesome than 2010 head on our blog and read all the details about joining (contact page).

Happy and successful 2011 to everyone!

Improving translation consistency with dictionary display in Rosetta

MULTIPLE DICTIONARIES

A few weeks ago I read an article about 10 problems that should be solved in Ubuntu. One of the problems was that are two strings: Recycle bin and Trash can. This really made me smile. While everyone agrees this is a problem, it is nothing compared to the challenges Non-English users are faced to. For almost every word in English there are multiple translations used in FLOSS software by Slovenian language (situation is similar in other languages I am at least partially fluent in). Additionally there are many strings, which were invented to describe a function of the software and don't exist outside the software world (I am talking about strings such as anycast or demultiplexer). These strings have no direct translations. To make things even more interesting some strings have multiple meanings in English (such as N/A which can mean either not available or not applicable).

If we are to offer the same quality of Ubuntu experience for Non-English users we need to unify translation strings. A question HOW? immediately pops up. Use a dictionary. Which one? Google Translate? Not specialized for FLOSS software (also very wrong sometimes). Use national Evoterm dictionary? It looks too Windows oriented. Then use some FLOSS dictionary. But which one? As always with volunteer projects people have various opinions and hence sometimes choose different options when translating.

In the past there was Slovenian dictionary (is some cases more like accepted strings within the project not formally published) for Gnome, KDE, Firefox, OpenOffice etc and each Linux distribution is also using own translation strings. Multiple groups had each their own dictionary, which are at least slightly incompatible.

UNITING DICTIONARIES

To solve that problem we decided to accept a common uniting dictionary. In order to speed up the word approval process we decided to start on small scale. This was about one year ago. Initially there was cooperation between Gnome and Ubuntu translators groups and later KDE also joined the fun :). The result is a dictionary Pojmovnik (please ignore the certificate warning) that is ambitiously trying to combine all of local FLOSS dictionaries into a single dictionary. Currently it holds some 860 words, which means more than two words are added per day in average.

TRANSLATION QUALITY ASSURANCE

Of course the dictionary needs to be used and old translations need to be fixed and terminology synchronized. To do that we spent the majority of Gnome 2.32 and Ubuntu 10.10 release cycle reviewing all .po files, removing old and adding new terminology and also fixing hundreds of minor bugs such as misspellings, which have lingered around for ages. As such Ubuntu 10.10 is dramatically more polished language wise compared to previous releases. Work was relatively easy for gnome packages using translation tools. Of course they weren't 100% effective so line per line review was still required, but there was no such possibility in Launchpad.

Additionally we wanted to have a way to easily suggest accepted terminology within Launchpad as changing tabs and searching for strings is not practical. Besides improving translations quality this could significantly increase translation pace.

We also discussed this at #ubuntu-translators but couldn't find fast and easy solution for us.

DICTIONARY DISPLAY IN ROSETTA

Then we started search for alternatives and found a nice Firefox extension, EHTip which is perfect for solving our problem. Extension uses local dictionary that can be prepared with simple syntax: "English word=Foreign word". Each string has to be in its own row and file saved into UTF-8 file format, saved for example with Gedit program. One of our tech savvy users created a bash script to transform dictionary wiki page into the syntax required by Firefox extension. Advantage of the extension is that it can be also used on other online translation pages such as Pootle. It's worth noting the extension author is planning to have Chrome-ium extension done by January 2011. We have also created detailed print-screen step-by-step instructions how to implement this solution. Several translators have started using it since (we created final version only last week), and they are reporting this has made their translation workflow much smoother and efficient. Such a success in such a short time is because of simplicity of us: Move mouse over English word and pop-up with translation appears. Can't be easier. See image below.

As we are very proud of our solution we are sharing it with everyone so you can use it in other translation teams as well.

If you are a translator please let us know how do you handle this. Is terminology a problem in your language? How are you trying to solve it and how successful are you? Please share your thoughts in the comments as we are very keen to know them. :)

Slovenian institute for blood transfusion uses Gnome desktop

Today I donated some blood again (this was my 9th time) to help to people who need it.

My blood type is 0+, which means everyone can use my blood so they kind of like it. Additionally my blood gets tested before anyone gets it. Hence I can regularly see if something wierd has appeared in my blood count.

Of course it would be pretty bad if the blood got mixed up so everything is labeled with stickers with barcodes running on some sort of database system.

Logo of Slovenian institute for blood transfusion 

When I came to register I noticed they use a program with limited UI capabilites (only a couple of fields to enter data), but much more interesting, surprising and joyful discovery was gnome panel sitting on top of the screen.

As there were only icons and clodk in the panel (no text), I wasn't able to determine whether gnome was localised or not, but nevertheless it was great to see  that software I am passionate about is being used in production environemnts where reliability and stability is a must.

Another example why it's good to translate. You never know who will find your work usefull :)

P.s. Unfortunately i don't have a screenshot because I forgot, but even if I wouldn't forget the picture probably wouldn't be any good, because computer monitor was behind glass window.

Slovenian Ubuntu 10.10 Release Party was a Success

On Tuesday at 19.00, the official part of the Ubuntu 10.10 release party took place in Kiberpipa.

Firstly, David Klasinc presented the new Ubuntu release in his own unique way, and also gave a presentation on the novelties of Ubuntu Netbook release. He emphasized the e-mail client called Evolution, and the Ubuntu Music Store, which is integrated in the Rhythmbox music player. Especially for the audience, he also demonstrated how to purchase music through the above mentioned service. During his presentation, he also came across a few problems which amused the audience. After that, he also presented cloud service Ubuntu One.

When David finished, Luka Napotnik took over and presented the activities of Ubuntu Slovenia webpage, and the community which creates it. He listed the current activities, presented the Slovenian translation group and future plans.

Following was the unofficial part, which began with the Ubuntu chestnut cake, while drinks soon followed. The visitors had a chance to get Ubuntu Slovenia and Kiberpipa T-shirts for a small donation. The party then continued to 10pm.

Hello Ubuntu planet!

Hello Ubuntu planet!

My name is Andrej Žnidaršič and I am coordinator of slovenian launchpad translation team and gnome slovenian translation team member.

You might be wondering why there is an image of Slovenian translation team on the left. That's because:

1. I am not really a blogging person and i don't have much time so there wouldn't be many posts
2. As a consequence of 1.) I believe it would be much better to have a shared blog with more activity and more readership.

So we decided to create a common translation blog with other translators, so we will have more posts and hopefuly achieve more visitors / better visibility of the blog.

The sole purpose of this blog is to promote translation work in slovenian lanugage, so most posts will be in slovenian. However a small portion will be posted in English as well to notify the rest of Ubuntu world what is happening in our little world :)

For beginning I can summarize what happened during 10.10 translation cycle. This has been my first translation cycle as a translation coordinator so it has a special meaning to me. We decided to really dive ourselves into work and significantly improve both the quality and quantity of translation.

During the last 6 months we have started with new quality control system (peer review), reviewed almost all old ubuntu translations string by string and fixed several hundreds, mistakes, typos and vocabular inconsistencies, organized 2 translators meetings, 7 translation jams (all online through our new jabber chatroom, were we hang out a lot these day), recruited 9 new members (a lot considering previous size of the team) and did a lot of translation work.

The result ? As can be seen by looking at these two links - http://people.ubuntu.com/~dpm/ubuntu-10.04-translation-stats.html and

http://people.ubuntu.com/~dpm/ubuntu-10.10-translation-stats.html we have managed to climbe 14 percentage points up to astonishing 98% and 10th place worldwide, which is amazing, especially if one takes into account the fact Slovenian language is only 178th worldwide (ranked by the number of native speakers). :) :) :)

This is an achievement we really take pride of and shows us all the hard work has really paid off.

As the number of remaining strings in the GUI of default Ubuntu install is approaching zero we have already established contact with Debian translation team and translation-project and are preparing to start sending our work back usptream, so that it can benefit others too (link with gnome has been traditionally good as both myself and some other translators are members of gnome translators group).

All in all we are very proud and excited to see how far we can reach in the next 6 months.

Andrej