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Dimitri


7,413 post(s)
#25-Mar-20 09:06

Manifold's outreach effort to encourage more localizations is making good progress, with comprehensive localizations already done for Bengali, Estonian, Filipino, French, German, Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. Whew!

By way of look-ahead, other localization projects underway include Arabic and Japanese. Malay is on the wish list but so far, no progress to report.

Are there any other languages of special interest to folks in this forum? Italian? Korean, maybe? Polish? Vietnamese?

One objective, by the way, is to support wider, philanthropic use of the free Viewer, supporting NGOs (non-profits) and other users in countries where there is a great need to at least be able to view spatial data, and large amounts of it.

artlembo


3,400 post(s)
online
#26-Mar-20 00:24

I know a bunch of students who are locked down here due to COVID-19, and as native speakers of some of these languages perhaps I could entice them to do it for an independent study - I'm sure they'd learn a lot just going through the translations.

How much time do estimate that an individual localization requires? And, do you think Manifold might provide them with a complimentary license for their troubles?

Dimitri


7,413 post(s)
#26-Mar-20 03:11

How much time do estimate that an individual localization requires?

That depends on the skills and background of the translator. When Manifold reaches out to universities to encourage a localization they sometimes suggest a student from a linguistics or translation curriculum. That's a mistake, because the translation is not literary, like translating a book, but is about translating computer tech words.

A good translator is a native-speaking computer science person with programming, good DBMS and (ideally) GIS background or CAD who knows computer jargon in the target language. They should know how to do search and replace for strings like <value> without inadvertently replacing Value in the name of tags. :-)

There are about 2700 lines in recent default.ui.txt files but there are many repetitions, so it goes quickly. Somebody who knows computer jargon / DBMS / GIS or CAD will usually take one long day to get most of it done, and then another, shorter day to proof read, ask questions about what should or should not be translated, etc.

Guidelines for translators are in the Localization topic.

do you think Manifold might provide them with a complimentary license for their troubles?

Sure! If an educational institution agrees to sponsor a translation, that is, to keep it updated from time to time for new builds, Manifold will donate some licenses to the university as well.

Sloots

678 post(s)
#30-Mar-20 20:46

Despite the fact that most dutch users have no problem using the english version, I started with the translation today. Dutch is the 56 largest language (approximately 21 million speakers).

I must say it is time consuming, buy also rather addictive. As soon as I'm done I will post the file.

Chris


http://www.mppng.nl/manifold/pointlabeler

Sigane17
8 post(s)
#28-Dec-20 15:26

When will the Italian translation be ready?

Sloots

678 post(s)
#28-Dec-20 20:17

As far as I know Manifold is not going to translate it to any language. All is done by volunteers. You might be the person who can do the italian translation.


http://www.mppng.nl/manifold/pointlabeler

Dimitri


7,413 post(s)
#29-Dec-20 07:14

Very true. There's also this from the Academic Licensing page:

New! A generous number of Manifold System Release 9 licenses may be donated at no charge to academic institutions which sponsor the creation of localization files for their national language or for a new language. This is a limited, experimental program. Please contact sales@manifold.net to participate.

That's a great way for a school or university to get free licenses - get some students to do a localization using Viewer. If you have some influence with an educational institution it's a great way to get Manifold in your language. The standard deal, by the way, is that the university commits to keeping their localization current for a year, at least for official builds.

An even faster way to get Manifold in your language is to simply do it yourself. You don't have to do the whole thing, as just a hundred or so translated words or short lines will cover the top level parts of the user interface that tend to get used the most. Investing a full day will create a remarkably good, albeit incomplete, localization. The Localization topic will get you started.

After the first hundred or so localizations, you can add others over time. But Sloots is right in that it can be addictive.

The biggest factor I've seen in getting localizations out to the community is that people are often shy about sharing what may be OK for themselves but which they feel may be very incomplete. I did a couple like that (French and Spanish) which were so bad that I didn't share them with anybody.

If that's a factor, you can always contribute a localization by sending it to me, or to sales, tech, webmaster for manifold.net, indicate that you want to contribute anonymously, say that you are putting the localization into the public domain, and it will get circulated on the forum as a candidate translation with no worries if it is incomplete, etc.

Most of the other localizations started as partial, quick efforts. It's then easier for other people to join in to improve them.

Dimitri


7,413 post(s)
#29-Dec-20 08:48

Here's a "quick and dirty" Italian translation I just did, with the help of translate.google.com.

This took me under 30 minutes for the first translation, start to finish, plus another ten or fifteen minutes to tinker. I think this file is a reasonable starting point for people who are native Italian speakers, to fix errors, search/replace for better words, etc.

First, a screenshot, with comments on the "quick and dirty" workflow I used below that.

Quick and dirty translations using Google:

translate.google.com can translate the entire default.ui.txt into a desired language, but it has a few limitations:

1. It can get confused by the use of the equal = sign, and fail to translate the word in patterns like tag=word unless there are space characters on either side of the = sign, as in tag = word. Easy to replace "=" with " = " in Notepad.

2. Likewise, words in angle < > brackets might not be translated, so those angle brackets should be set off with space characters. Easy to replace "<" with "< " and ">" with " >" in Notepad.

3. Words that are prefixed with & can be not translated. Easy to replace "&" with "& " in Notepad.

4. Google sometimes translates SQL key words and sometimes not.

5. It translates only 5000 characters at a time, and then you have to press Next to translate the next 5000 chars.

Workflow:

Start with default.ui.txt.

1. Open default.ui.text in Notepad.

2. Replace "=" with " = ".

3. Replace "<" with "< " and ">" with " >".

4. Replace "&" with "& ". Even better, delete all & since it is unlikely Google will handle access keys correctly.

5. In translate.google.com choose English on the left and the target language (say, Italian) on the right.

6. Copy the entire text from default.ui.txt and paste into the left side of translate.google.text.

7. It will translate the first 5000 characters. Copy those and paste into a destination ui.xx.txt file that is open in Notepad.

8. Press Next in the google translate bar to have the next 5000 characters transated. Copy those and paste into the destination ui.xx.txt file.

9. Be careful to copy all the translated characters from the first to the last. Carefully check the first and last lines for errors, where Google can mistranslate a tag that's broken up by the 5000 character limitation.

10. Make sure to save the destination ui.xx.txt file as UTF-8.

In the destination file:

Google sometimes injects extra space before / after $ when used as a bracket character.

11. Find "$ " and " $" where $ used as bracket and eliminate extra spaces, eg: $ manifold $ to $manifold$

12. Replace "& " with "&". No need to fix spaces with <> angle brackets, as google seems to remove extra spaces automatically.

13. Quickly scan down the tags to see if any have been translated. If so, replace them with the original from default.ui.txt.

14. Quickly scan down the BuilderQuery... tags to see if any SQL for those tags has been translated. If so, replace the SQL with the original English SQL from default.ui.txt.

Here's a comparison of an English query builder and my first Italian query builder before I fixed the above:

After making the fixes in step 14:

You can see from the above that Google isn't perfect. For example, sometimes it translates "component" as "componente" and sometimes it doesn't. But that's an easy fix with a careful (check each instance), case sensitive search and replace of "component" for "componente". Other small errors like that are also very easy to fix.

All the above took me 45 minutes for Italian, the first time I ever used this workflow. The actual copy/paste/copy into google took less than 20 minutes (it goes fast).

Attachments:
Italian_command_window.jpg
Italian_command_window2.jpg
Italian_manifold.jpg
ui.it.txt

Dimitri


7,413 post(s)
#29-Dec-20 09:04

Here's the ui.it.txt file without any access keys (& characters removed).

Attachments:
ui.it.txt

Dimitri


7,413 post(s)
#29-Dec-20 11:30

OK, here's the last one of these I'll do. This has many instances where some words, like value, were translated (valore), but not in other instances.

I also corrected some obvious errors in the Google translation, for example, replacing livello / livelli with strato / strati for layer / layers.

Sloots sure said it right, that this is addictive. Can be hard to pull away. :-)

Time for a native Italian speaker to take over...

Attachments:
ui.it.txt

Dimitri


7,413 post(s)
#29-Dec-20 13:34

Correction. That should be...

10. Make sure to save the destination ui.xx.txt file as UTF-8 with BOM

It is important to save using UTF8 with BOM and not just UTF8.

Sigane17
8 post(s)
#11-Jan-21 10:10

Thanks a lot for the translation, it's a great place to start.

I am a new user of Manifold 9 and then I do not know all the features

but I will try to change something in mother tongue.

If anyone wants to help please contact me

Sergio40 post(s)
#11-Jan-21 14:49

Si dai, forse una mano posso darla anch'io, nei ritagli di tempo.


s

Sigane17
8 post(s)
#13-Jan-21 16:05

I have changed something, but I don't know Manifold 9 well yet, I have always worked with 8. Attached is a version yet to be reviewed. Not sure how to translate "Tile" suggestions?

He won't be working on it until Monday so if you want to start with this one

Attachments:
ui.it.txt

oeaulong

521 post(s)
#14-Jan-21 01:31

mattonella?

Dimitri


7,413 post(s)
#14-Jan-21 05:23

Not sure how to translate "Tile" suggestions?

Many documentation authors in Italian do not translate "tile" but simply use it as is.

For example: "Guida rapida su MapProxy — OSGeo-Live 11.0 Documentation" includes text like

La pagina demo di MapProxy contiene un client rudimentale per WMS e tile per ogni layer configurato.

Much of the OsGeo documentation doesn't translate "layer" either. For example, the mapserver documentation at Guida rapida su MapServer — OSGeo-Live 11.0 Documentation uses text like

Tutti i layer specificati nella proprietà “&LAYERS=…” che hanno STATUS ON nel mapfile insieme a tutti i layer con STATUS DEFAULT saranno riprodotti.

"Tutti i layer," indeed. :-)

Sergio40 post(s)
#14-Jan-21 08:28

Tile: piastra, maybe. Not fully convinced though.

As to layer: strato, but not satisfying at all ...

Therefore agreeing with Dimitri.


s

Sigane17
8 post(s)
#18-Jan-21 12:20

So unchanged Layer, Table, Tile which are universally known terms. I am proceeding with corrections and hope to give a final version this week

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