Go to: typo3.com Home TYPO3 Association Home typo3.org Home Certification FLOW3 Bugtracker Forge (Development Platform) News Buzz (TYPO3 Blogs) Wiki Mailing lists TYPO3 Snippets

Search:

Proposed by: Ingo Renner
Mentor: probably Ingo Renner
Student working on it: -
Level: Medium

The current way of translating labels used in the TYPO3 backend and in TYPO3 extensions is like follows:

A dedicated server exists with backend logins shared for each language. Translations are handled through EXT:llxmltranslate. For each language a team exists that translates labels to their language. New labels for translation are made available by updating the underlaying TYPO3 installation from time to time. If translators want to translate labels of an extension they need to ask the chief translator to install that extension. Community members who want to help translate labels need to get in contact with their preferred language's team to get the backend login for that language.

The success of this project would make it significantly easier to translate TYPO3 to different languages and thus enabling TYPO3 to spread to even more countries.

The issues with this system are quite obvious:

• Core Labels are not always current
• Only installed extensions are translatable
• Users share passwords
• A backend login to the server is required
• One can create translations only through the backend
• Users need to find out who their language's team leader is, participation is complicated
• Translations can not happen spontaneously
• The whole process is not transparent and the community can not track progress of translations.

The goal is to create a system that eliminates all or most of the current issues.

We need a system that

• works in the frontend (frontend plugin)
• allows every registered fontend user to make (suggest) translations for labels
• allows the chief translators for languages to keep control of the translations finally accepted as correct translation for a label
• shows progress of translations for each language

Further more (as secondary goals) it should be possible to track translator statistics so that we can identify top translators. An export and import to .po files should be possible to allow users to use desktop translation tools.

The translation process should work like follows:

A frontend user first registers on typo3.org, in his profile he sets the languages he can speak so that he only needs set them once and does not select it each time. He then goes to the translation server / pages and sees an overview of projects available for translation. These projects are the core and extensions.

After selecting a project the user can select a part he wants to work on. In the core that would be a module, context sensitive help or other smaller chunks of the overall core. For extensions these smaller parts would be backend modules, frontend plugins, context sensitive help, field labels or other available parts.

So the user starts translating... He picks a label and provides a translation. This translation is saved as a suggestion. Other translation suggestions may exist, in that case the user can vote for a suggestion he feels is correct.

At some point the chief translator for a language looks over the available suggestions. This could also be triggered by notifications after a certain part has been translated and an email has been sent to the chief translator. The chief translator looks over the available suggestions and accepts one for each label. When done, a package of the finished translations is released to the TYPO3 Extension Repository (TER) and distributed to the TYPO3 installations (distribution already works).

Nothing special apart from the usual PHP programming skills.

the functionality could be inspired by Launchpad's Rosetta:

• https://launchpad.net/rosetta/
• https://translations.launchpad.net/
• https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/+translations

or by Drupal's translation server (also inspired by Rosetta).