Translators, it's your turn (again) (upcoming 7.0 release)

paul · August 22, 2022, 6:53pm

So we’re now getting much, much closer to a release of Ardour 7.0. We’re not yet in a total string freeze (where we guarantee not to change any translatable text at all before release), but realistically we’re not far from that. To avoid translations delaying the release and/or not being available for the new version, it’s probably a good time for the translation team(s) to start working on the update for 7.0.

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 7.0 release.

ClausRogge · August 23, 2022, 5:03am

I’d really love to help out here but not sure I could follow these instructions … anyway most Danish people are rather confident in English so there wouldn’t be much need

prokoudine · August 23, 2022, 8:09am

I wrote those instructions, so if they are not obvious, please let me know how to improve them.

sonnie · August 28, 2022, 4:33pm

My 2 cents: As a professional translator, this looks like a horrible workflow to me.

If I get jobs, there is always a well working web localization tool (CAT) to work with. Like XTM, memsource, weblate (self-hostable) and many others.

Maybe it’s worth to install something for a better (faster, more easy usable) workflow, if you want free contributions. Many open source projects relate on a CAT. And they are often easy to use for not so advanced users.

paul · August 28, 2022, 7:19pm

We have looked at a few web-centric localization workflows, and at the time, although they were shinier and easier to use for someone who had never done anything like this before, they seemed to have several downsides compared to this “historical” workflow.

Personally, I’m agnostic about such matters, given that I’m not a translator. We also don’t have any one around who has ever volunteered to set up a workflow that would ultimately generate the .mo files that we need a run time. If that happened, I wouldn’t argue against it.

x42 · August 28, 2022, 7:37pm

One usually has to run Ardour to ensure that translated text does not break any layout assumptions.

guybrushdeepwood · September 3, 2022, 7:42pm

Sounds like an interesting CI problem