Hi all, I wanted to share the following example from the Apache Tomcat project.
Tomcat provides localisation (l10n) support in the form of translations of error messages and some UI elements. There has been interest recently in expanding the UI elements that have l10n support and providing Russian translations for them. I wondered if there was a translation tool that would help the Tomcat project manage these translations and - potentially - make it easier for contributors to provide translations. One of the challenges is that Tomcat organises its translations using one file per Java package so there are multiple files for each language. All the tools I found were based on one file per language. I worked around this by writing some code to convert Tomcat's source files to/from a single file per language [1]. I then looked at a couple of tools and settled on POEditor. [2] Working on the import/export tools and loading the data into POEditor enabled a number of typos and stale entries to be cleaned up. That alone made the effort seem worth while. Before I advertised the tool, we had 2.5k translations with at least minimal coverage in 4 languages. I advertised the tool and called for volunteers on users@ and via Twitter on Monday. As I type this (Friday) we have 4.3k translations with at least minimal coverage in 7 languages and another 4 languages that are working towards minimal coverage. I very deliberately set the Tomcat project up with permissions as wide open as possible. Anyone can join. Anyone can add a new language. Anyone can add translations. Anyone can wipe out all the translations. No reviews / approvals / moderation required. Yes, we had a minor issue last night when someone accidentally wiped out all of the Chinese translations. One of the Chinese translators pinged the users@ list this morning and I was able to restore them. No big deal. They are also regularly transferred to svn so we have a back-up there as well as in the tool. In summary, having a low barrier to entry means the Tomcat project has been able to attract ~40 new contributors this week alone who have provided 1.8k new translations with another ~30 new people having expressed an interest but not yet contributed. Mark [1] https://svn.apache.org/viewvc/tomcat/trunk/java/org/apache/tomcat/buildutil/translate/ [2] https://poeditor.com/projects/view?id=221603 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org
