eds.activemath.org

Translation tools are many… but what good are they? To my surprise, there’s always some folks that find a tool that sounds cute but then it never helps. Let me try to identify the hard questions of translations’ management:

• workflow of updates (by developers) and management of translators’ contributions
• recognizing context when translating phrases
• managing translation duties for documents and phrases

The fancy conclusion? No tool I’ve met really helps any except the management of duties and generally they do so by making completely impossible the others.

My experience has been with java properties files which are simple text files that represent the model of a dictionary of phrases. Many other encodings of such models exist, it is the most common model of internationalizing applications: the developers pull `phrases’ from the dictionary of the right language so as to let the software speak that language.

Internationalization sometimes is also done at translations of full documents, in particular document documents, which really make no sense to write using phrases but should be authored as documents. There’s not much to say about it except a management of duty is necessary for it.

The solution most software development projects have is by managing the phrases translated as one language per file in the form of source files. Java properties file are an example of encoding of such files: they are plain text, can be encoded using appropriate text-encoding so that internationalized charsets can be used, once done they enter the build system and get into the software distribution.

For activemath, this has meant our lead to contact from time to time the translators, sending them the revised properties files and receiving and incorporating the result. Not too big a work I think.

For i2geo (based on xwiki and curriki), this has meant the translator-manager to request web-editing of properties files.

Where most of the tools to help translations wish to help is at organizing the translations of phrases by providing a web-interface to let translators work in an easy world of web-forms contributions. Compared to the process of exchanging build-files this solves two issues which are rather superficial: usage of appropriate charset and end-of-lines, these two issues are moot if the translator is used to a good text-editor (ie. a slight bit more than MS Notepad!).

But these tools generally break something more which is fundamental: the order of the phrases and the comments that provide contexts and explanations! At least this has been the experience we had with 99translations.com and seems to be what pootle and tmx do as well.

So we stick to our properties files thus far until something better can be found.

paul