Translation time for upcoming Ardour 8.0 release

paul · September 16, 2023, 3:37pm

We’re now about a week away from the release of Ardour 8.0. We are in a total string freeze (where we guarantee not to change any translatable text at all before release). It’s probably a good time for the translation team(s) to start working on the update for 8.0.

Currently Ardour translations for Czech, German, Greek, Spanish, UK English, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portugese (Brazilian and Portugese versions), Russian, Swedish and Chinese. If you’d like to add another language, you can find the instructions for creating (and maintaining) translations here:

github.com

Ardour/ardour/blob/master/TRANSLATORS

Ardour User Interface Translation How-To

Ardour's user interface can be translated into many languages. For this the
application uses gettext engine. It works like this: there is a plain text
editable PO file for every language that contains a number of sequences like: a
line in English, a line in target language and a reference to a line in source
code where original text in English comes from. The build system then creates a
binary version of each PO file with MO file extension and places it in a system
directory where running instance of Ardour will pick and use it.

Ardour has two main PO files to translate: for user interface and for Ardour's
library. Some messages from the library are actually passed to user interface
(various warnings, for example), so ideally you have to translate both. For
example, Russian translations are located here:

gtk2_ardour/po/ru.po
libs/ardour/po/ru.po

There are few supplementation translations that can be found here (again,
showing the case for Russian):

This file has been truncated. show original

If you’re an existing translator for one of the above languages, please try to find the time to go through the update process as soon as possible. Your work is much appreciated, and we’d like to have as many languages updated as possible before the 8.0 release.

tristan.tarrant · September 16, 2023, 3:50pm

Have you guys considered adding Ardour to https://weblate.org/ ?

paul · September 16, 2023, 3:53pm

I haven’t looked into that one specifically. The last time we looked into various cloud-based translation approaches, none of them appeared to integrate with GNU gettext, which we use throughout the software. Do you know if weblate does this?

x42 · September 16, 2023, 4:38pm

Another issue with various online translation tools is that just translating text will not produce good results for authoring tools such as a DAW.

Often compromises will have to be made for specific buttons and menus in order to retain a nice layout. For this one has to be able to run the application.

tristan.tarrant · September 17, 2023, 3:09pm

Weblate does support Gettext Translating software using GNU gettext - Weblate 5.0.2 documentation
I agree with Robin: context is key (although not just for authoring tools) and it may be tricky to get things right. However it may be a good aid in getting a first pass at a translation which can later be fine tuned by running the application itself.

jujudusud · September 17, 2023, 3:52pm

Hi here, I started a french translation update with the Github PR #819.
It is draft for now but I will try to make the whole necessary before the end of the week.

Thanks a lot.

docksudbbs · September 18, 2023, 10:14pm

Maybe you already know transifex, I participate in some open source projects that the translation teams are there… it doesn’t seem like a bad tool to me. The good thing is that several people can collaborate on a translation without managing patches or PR’s… Simply, then the developers download the latest .po

paul · September 18, 2023, 10:41pm

I think we’ve already explained why this workflow doesn’t work very well in a GUI with lots of labelled elements.

edrickblade · September 23, 2023, 12:13pm

Congratulations for this upcoming release, I’m so exited to test it!

prokoudine · October 10, 2023, 10:15am

Ardour’s Korean translator uses Transifex. Every time we have to clean their translation up from duplicates. Not sure at which point things break, but that doesn’t put a lot of faith into Transifex for me (although I’ve used it in the past too).