Made with Creative Commons: Starting a translation project

2017.06.06

Dear Lazyweb,

About a week ago, I learnt about the release of an interesting book by the fine people at Creative Commons: Made with Creative Commons. The book itself is, of course, CC BY-SA-licensed.

I downloaded it and started reading right away. Some minutes later, I ordered a dead-tree copy, which arrived a couple of days ago. (I’m linking to the publisher’s page, but bought it from Amazon México… Shipping it from Denmark would not have been as cheap and fast, I guess).

Anyway, given my workplace, given the community I know, given I know something like this is much needed… I will start a Spanish translation of the content. There are at least two other people interested in participating, and I haven’t yet publicized my intentions (this is the first public statement about it).

So, dear Lazyweb: What I need is a good framework for doing this. I started by creating a Git repository, and we were discussing to translate to Markdown (to later format according to the desired output) but then I thought… If we want the translation to be updateable, and to be able to properly accept other people’s work, maybe a better format is warranted?

So, my current idea is to create a Markdown version for the English original, and find a way to shoehorn^Wseparate it by paragraphs and feed it to Gettext, which is the best translation framework I have used (but is meant for code translation, not for full-text)…

Dear lazyweb: What tools do you recommend me to use? Quite important to me: Are they Free tools? Are they easy to use by third-parties, maybe incorporating work via Git? Or, at least, via a Web front-end that allows me as a project lead to review and approve/fix/reject strings?

Thanks, lazyweb!

Comments

Anonymous 2017-06-06 11:13:16

Weblate

Weblate https://weblate.org/en/ has gotten quite a bit of discussion on planet.debian.org where I read your blog. It would be the tool I would turn to, to manage the translation process. That doesn’t answer the questions about the other layers.

Anonymous 2017-06-06 15:19:59

You can use spell checker

You can use spell checker Hunspell and grammar checker LanguageTool on your translated text.

Antonio Terceiro 2017-06-08 09:26:00

po4a + weblate

I would use po4a to manage the PO/POT files, and weblate for a translation UI.

weblate can both pull and push directory from/to your git repository. IIRC you can tell it to always only push to a dedicated branch, so you can manage the merging of that into a master branch by yourself. and it will properly identify the author of each translation in git commits, so you also get that.

CFuga 2017-06-06 16:50:44

There’s already an answer for your question.

po4a: https://po4a.alioth.debian.org/

It could allow you to generate POT/PO files used by gettext, and use the translations to recreate the book in Spanish.

gwolf 2017-06-09 17:28:03

Thanks for the comments so far!

Thanks to everybody who has taken time to recommend tools for this work! We now have quite a bit of work to do, starting this whole thing up. I’ll follow up in an independent blog post.

Thanks!

Marcos Mezo 2017-06-06 15:35:42

take a look at the debian adminisrator handbook.

take a look at the Debian administrator handbook by Raphael Herzog. Its translated in exactly the way you suggest, either by cloning a git repo or using hosted weblate. I don’t know the details about how commit rights are managed.

Stanislaw Krukowski 2017-06-10 21:38:08

Translation by Weblate

I have been using the Weblate – a free web-based translation management system – since last year. For me, it’s very convinient tool to translate the Free Software Projects. At the moment, I translate, the Debian Administrator’s Handbook from English to Polish, and I like this form of translation. I am not a programmer but I use Debian for everyday tasks so I’ve decided to learn more about Debian just by translating the Project. By doing so, I help other people in Poland more understand Debian so the benefit is double.

Here is the quote from https://hosted.weblate.org/about/ :

Weblate is a web based translation tool with tight version control integration. It features simple and clean user interface, propagation of translations across components, quality checks and automatic linking to source files.

Stanislaw Krukowski 2017-06-10 21:39:33

Translation by Weblate

Here is the quote from https://hosted.weblate.org/about/ :

TheKreek 2017-06-06 21:54:51

I’m interested in translating it too

I’m interested in helping with the translation, are you interested in help from others?