Blender is moving its Manual and UI translation efforts to a more user-friendly web-based interface, Weblate. The goal is to lower the barrier of entry (no knowledge of versioning systems like SVN or Git is necessary), and to make casual minor fixes (like typos and such) trivial for any user, through the suggestions and review process.
Weblate also allows teams to work simultaneously on the same translation, and comes with helpful additional tools, like a glossary.
At this point you can already submit suggestions to translations, which need to be reviewed and approved.
In order to become an official translator/contributor (for both the Manual and the UI), ask to be added to the translators group on Blender Chat or Blender Chat .
Known issues:
Submitting a large PO file to weblate (after off-line translation e.g.) takes several minutes to be processed, leaving the page in ‘refresh’ mode all this time. If the processing takes over ten minutes, it will show a timeout error from the server. The operation will be processed though, no need to re-upload the file. After some waiting and reloading the page, the contribution should be finally visible in the web interface.
Due to the move on this new platform, existing translators and contributors are kindly requested to follow the two steps above (sign up with Blender ID and reach out in the chat) to be added to the project again.
Plan of action
To get the new translation system officially available, we act as follows (starting from tomorrow, Thursday 14th, in the morning European time):
Design/UX:
Update website identity to fit with Blender
Tweak login page to give better feedback about the “wait”
Remove/tweak alerts about Weblate itself
Update OG and other meta information to be Blender Specific
Make UI translation SVN frozen, convert it to git, publish new repo.
Make Manual translations git frozen.
Import UI & Manual translation git repos in weblate.
Update i18n add-on used to generate UI translations from Blender.
Update documentation (Manual itself, and wiki pages for UI translations).
Hi Satoshi,
Yes you need to be translator to upload PO files, I added you to this group earlier today so should be possible for you now.
Let me know if you have more issues!
Mismatched full stop
Could you disable the “Mismatched full stop” warning?
Some of msgids have a period at end of the line, but AFAIK, Blender UI drawing code adds it automatically, so I’ve never added it at end of translated (msgstr) strings.
However, this warning enforces to add it, otherwise I can’t remove the “Needs editing” flag from some of msgstrs to finish translation.
Or, are there any settings for each language?
Not all types of UI messages will automatically get a final period, so in some rare cases these are valid and required. And yes, this period thingy is a very stupid thing in our UI code currently. But it’s always better for translations to follow the source message anyway.
This msgid is ended with “…”, which repesents “etc.” or “and so on”, but the “Mismatched full stop” feature treats as a period too. In Japanese, the verb (in this sample, “Show”) usually follows the objects (curves, lattices…), so in this case, the translation becomes odd thing when I add it at end of line.
Again, could you please get rid the restriction or make it not “forced”?
Thanks,
That is unfortunate… but yes, indeed since we do not use the actual ellipsis character in these cases, we’ll have to remove the ‘mismatched full stop’ test.
Done.
