Dakons blog

Regardless of what release cycles we will have in future, the next release will come. Depending on how much time you can spend on hacking KDE it might also be there rather soon. Nevertheless the same things will happen for every major release: a bunch of new strings have to be translated.

While the translation teams for Greek, Ukrainian and Portugese are obviously competing for the 100% crown (go on, guys! *g*) other teams fell way behind them. That is not a problem yet, as trunk is still very much work in progress. But one or the other day the string freeze will come and then there is a bunch of work to do. Keep in mind that every percent is more than 1000 strings to translate.

While Germany has a great amount of KDE coders the number of strings untranslated e.g. in this team is big. Many modules from playground have noone actually caring about them. Worst example is playground-network with more than 2000 strings, which is completely untranslated. New translators are very welcome, also we have some requirements. I don't think the other language teams will send you home when you step up to help them, so ask them.

Translation is a good entry point if you want to contribute to KDE (the other one is writing documentation) and don't want to or are not able to do coding. Of course you have to know both english and the language you want to translate to rather well. Nevertheless it's a great help for the module translation maintainers if you even pick only the low hanging fruits and translate the trivial 20% of strings from a big module so he or she only needs to do a quick review. Many terms are rather common between many programs (think of the "File" menu entries and the descriptions in the about box) so you can just copy them from other places without making too much mistakes.

I found the way to the translation team by coding in KGpg. As I'm a native speaker of German I thought it would be best if I not only write the English strings, but the German ones, too. Since I exactly know what happens at certain points in code it was very easy for me to find a useful translation. Afterwards the translation team only went by and polished some wordings, but again I saved them some work that they could spend on other modules. So if you are a maintainer of a program and are a good writer in a non-English language: contact your translation team and ask if they need help for your program (or anywhere else).

And for all those that are not sure what the heck I meant in KGpg with one or the other string: just ask me. The number of string changes until the release should be rather small for KGpg, the work I plan to do is only internal and shouldn't normally touch the strings. So if you translate it now hopefully nothing of your work should get lost and you have some time for other modules later.

By the way: the translation results for the documentation are even worse than the GUI ones (hey Greek team, where are you there? *g*). Be extra careful if you want to work there to check if the documentation still matches the program features. If not mail the documentation author first with a patch to improve the English documentation or ask someone else to assist you with that. A good starting point is the #kde-docs channel on Freenode.