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Blender Translation: you can help

28

The Chinese Blender community has taken it upon itself to coordinate (part of) the Blender translation in the so-called 'Garlic branch'. They could use YOUR help as well!

Ethan Luo writes:

The garlic branch blender is almost done and pending for release, and we BlenderCN is supporting this project to take care the PO translation work. The plan of release is October v2.60 based on Ton’s roadmap. So before that we hope to get more local language fully support for the final merge use. I hope we still have time coz Xiao just finished the last code issues under win 32bit.

I really hope you could help us to publish a news in BlenderNation to spread this request to all over the world. We need more local language translators to involve in this project and make the PO translated as soon as possible with high quality. Here’re some link for your information:

The PO is hosted on Google Code.

Anyone who interested to join us please send me a email for committer access. [see link below]

Links

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

28 Comments

  1. Why isn't someting like Launchpad used for organizing collective translation efforts online?

    https://launchpad.net/

    Just upload the english po file - and then everybody can translate to their language simultainously and even get translation suggestions from a database of previous translations. And then builders can download fresh po or mo files directly to include in their builds.

    I've used it for DVD slideshow GUI and it works well:
    Ex. https://translations.launchpad.net/dvdslideshowgui/trunk

  2. I think endi is right.

    Most CG terminology here in Germany remain English.
    Only common things as "Open File" "Add" and stuff from the preferences can be translated. Thats also because many tutorials are in English or relate to the English version, even if it is a German blender book (at least up to now).
    Tool tips translation is a great idea!

  3. Hi Endi/Marcus,

    I totally agree with you to translate the tooltip only maybe for Italy or Germany. But for particular some countries like China or Japan where people don't use English a lot to speak and poor in read. The full translation then become very important. If you have time you can choose to join the translation work and only work for tooltip as you wish, if someone else need the full translation, they can help to work on that later or at the same time. :)
    regards,
    congcong009

  4. And yes, I mean it seriously :D Greek translation of tooltips sounds quite interesting. It maybe could help widen the Blender user base here.

  5. I think translating everything is ok, but must be an option in Blender for:

    -translate menus
    -translate buttons
    -translate tooltips

    etc.

    This will help for everybody.

    I think most of the 3d software users must learn a basic english at least.

  6. I agree with endi.
    We will land in a total tutorial disaster, if we have tutorials for each language, it will become very hard to share knowledge in Blender.
    When someone teaches something in the UI of his language, then the knowledge will be limited to the people understanding that knowledge.
    This is not the idea of open source :O

  7. +1 to Jimmyon. But then, which language should be the standard language? Chinese and Spanish are the most common languages, but more than a third of Blender users are American, and more than half are native English speakers.

    And, don't tell us about google translate, that program is good for comic relief and Inter-Latin translation, but useless when going between Latin and Arabic or Asian to Cryllic, etc.

  8. As much as this pains people to no end in some countries, especially in France, the only practical international language is English. It's the language that more people speak and study as a second language, bar none.

  9. @Terrachild

    You know, we ship Linux to schools in my country, and we do hear from teachers who ask how to switch to Russian locale. Maybe you expect people in their 40s and 50s (and sometimes 60s) to have fluent technical English, but I don't. Neither I expect kids to have it. This is purely impractical.

  10. Blender.org Visitors

    American English 6,593,657
    German 1,241,536
    French 950,299
    British English 616,942
    Brazilian Portuguese 456,276
    Spanish (Spain) 406,967
    Italian 388,754
    Russian 378,978
    English 349,113
    Polish 341,716
    Spanish 321,123
    Dutch 235,542
    Japanese 228,797
    German(Germany) 159,425
    French(France) 120,291

  11. @Alexandre

    What are we going to do? Localized Blender UIs will fragment the tutorial network. English only Blender will continue to alienate half of its user base. :S

  12. @K M

    I seriously doubt this can be solved in an elegant way :) Personally, I tend to mention English menu paths in textual tutorials on Inkscape and GIMP. Can't see authors of video tutorials being huge fans of that approach though :)

  13. Hey, Google Code has boycotted some countries, like Iran.
    Shouldn't we have translations?!
    I don't know who the hell makes decisions like this.

  14. @tin2tin

    We tried to use the lauchpad, but after few discuss and tried we finally choose not to use it. Here're few reasons:
    1, It is too complicated for some normal user to understand and use it.
    2, The total item will be around 10k, but there's no page jump option which make the work really hard.
    3, Some place are blocked to use this site.
    FYI the site link: https://translations.launchpad.net/blender/translations/+pots/blender

    So that's why we just want to make a simple way to finish this job.

    @endi

    We don't have that request for initial Galric branch, so if that is really necessory we can put it into a todo list for future. :)

    @Jimmyon

    I agree that there may have more tutorials in each language. But if there're no local language version, it will limit people to learn the applicaion for the same.

    @Cae

    Please send me a email if you cannot access the Google Code. I will help you to commit changes to server.

    =====================

    And for my personal opinion, to make a native version software is very necessory especially for user not developor. I understand English could be the global language. But in some countries like China, even we have spend over 10years to study English from high school but still most of people face problem to read and listen English. The Chinese is so much different from English!

    It will be very confortable for people to use some softwares in native language, that's why Windows also provide English, French, Japanese and Chinese version etc. Photoshop and 3D Max are widely used in China as they both could provide a Chinese version, so I hope a native version Chinese Blender could help to make it more popular too.

    Some artists are very good at art but we cannot request them to be very good at English. Furthur more if you hope to spread the Blender in high school or to some special group people, they may face problem to read these materials and interface in English.

    And for some similar sistuation, I believe some countries face the similar sistuation too. The different language will not make the tutorials messed up in my opinion, in fact it will help to make more talent and interesting materials from more people's invlove!

  15. You can use: http://www.transifex.net

    Shotwell use it for translation, it's simple to use.

    I made Blender Serbian translation years ago, and I will do it now again.
    I don't think many Serbian people use it (I agree that tooltip translation would be most useful), but it's good to know that your language exist in the global English era. :)

    I'm proud to be Serbian, and to speak Serbian language. This is supranational project, and should speak all world languages.

    Out of subject, funny (crazy) Serbian lessons:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfLvnXIu664

    Full support for all translation teams! :)

  16. You can use: http://www.transifex.net

    Shotwell use it for translation, it's simple to use.

    I made Blender Serbian translation years ago, and I will do it now again.
    I don't think many Serbian people use it (I agree that tooltip translation would be most useful), but it's good to know that your language exist in the global English era. :)

    I'm proud to be Serbian, and to speak Serbian language. This is supranational project, and should speak all world languages.

    Out of subject, funny (crazy) Serbian lessons:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfLvnXIu664

    Full support for all translation teams! :)

    PS: This site don't support unicode, it's sad. :(

  17. Blender translation from simple po files and simple tools is a HUGE MISTAKE.
    Blender has mechanical engineering terminology, photography terminology and others.
    Same words have different translation in other languages and it's easy to translate with the wrong terminology because we forgot.
    We need a special tool, where we'll submit the translation of the terminology and after that, we'll translate the po files, with warnings when the translation isn't like the terminology.
    After we can translate various tutorials based on the po file.

  18. @Dimitris D

    In general, vocabulary is a good idea. However the problem you are talking about is non-existant. Take it from someone who has been spending last 10 years localizing various multimedia software.

    If a term should be translated in a special way, there should be a comment in source code. That comment will be picked by gettext tools and put into PO file so that translator will see this hint from developers.

    Furthermore, any sane PO editor supports translation memory and allows filling translations with past translations manually or automatically. So you can always see what similar messages were translated like.

    Also, the "after that, we’ll translate the po files, with warnings when the translation isn’t like the terminology" isn't clear to me at all. I've yet to see a PO editor that warns about incorrect use of terminology. Where did see this?

    I'm sorry, but I just don't see your proposal working, for both technical and workflow reasons.

  19. Well here in América we have Spanish, English, Portuguese, French and more native languages... I work with Blender in all my software in English, but my native language is Spanish, however a lot of people would like to use Blender in Spanish, Specially the old people ( I know a lot of them), because it's hard to understand other language for them. It's important that software comes in native languages becuase makes it affordable. And no all the world speaks English. Besides the open source and the Free software is great because gives us the posibility to choose... And the language is the basic option to choose I think.

  20. Cosette Malinowski on

    Hello! If you’re involved in software localization, I warmly recommend this powerful, user-friendly localization tool: https://poeditor.com/ It supports multiple popular localization file formats and also has its own API for more automation.

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