Translation project - help wanted

dokumori's picture

Generally, language barrier is a huge hindrance to dissemination of FOSS in countries where English is not a national language. I found out the other day that Drupal is rather minor in Japan, as translation of modules, manuals and tutorials has hardly been done.

I have started translation major modules and their documentations, but for English being my second language, I sometimes have hard time understanding some sentence and expression. So I am wondering if any of you can help this small translation project.

I won't ask you to translate stuff into Japanese. I just need some native English speaker (or someone just as fluent) to answer my silly questions like 'what does xxxx mean?' or 'is this describing about xxxx ?' or things like that. 

If you can help me, please let me know and I will send you some questions once every few days. 

Thanks! 

Robert Castelo's picture

Happy to help

Happy to help, just wondering what the best format would be..... maybe posting questions here as comments to this post, then we can add threaded comments as explanations. I think that would be a good way to do it because it makes it more open to being a group effort.
dokumori's picture

OK. Let's utilise this thread.

Thanks Robert! I think it's a good idea to post questions and answers here as comments. 

Can I also have your suggestion on which modules and documentations I should be translating? I am planning to translate modules and documentations that are indispensable for most sites e.g. Views, CCK. Legal, Secure Pages and Simplenews. Can you name any other important module?

(Hmm... This is gonna keep me busy for a while...)

Robert Castelo's picture

Popular Modules

There's a nice list here of download statistics here, you can see which are the most popular modules as far as downloads anyway.

Drupal also has some functionality for installations to phone home and give details of what modules are being used, but I haven't seen any statistics from that yet. 

dokumori's picture

Question: 'Filter'

I'm working on Views module now and having a hard time translating a word 'filter'. If I translate the word directly, it will sound as if an argument is filtering node sets by chromatography paper.

The original sentence is found in views_node.inc, which goes like this:
The argument will filter by the node title

Will it retain the same meaning if I say:
The argument will sift nodes by their titles
or
The argument will extract results by the node title

Your suggestion will be appreciated. :) 

Robert Castelo's picture

Between sift and extract,

Between sift and extract, sift seems the closest. In English we could also say:

'The argument used will determine what nodes are displayed based on their titles'

Would that translate more clearly?

 

dokumori's picture

I might go with 'sift'

Thanks Robert. Your paraphrase is good, but since the expression appears in many other places, I think it will be easier to simply replace the word 'filter' with 'sift'. Please let me know if there is a synonym that fits better.
dokumori's picture

Question: 'Theming'

Can anyone paraphrase the word 'theming' and 'themable function'? Thanks.
Robert Castelo's picture

The main point is that the

The main point is that the theme deals with stucture/markup (XHTML) and style (CSS), so you could paraphrase it as display structure and style of the output.

Themable function means that a function does the right thing, and passes it's output through a theme function. As the output of theme functions can be overridden by themes, it means the function becomes 'themable'.

dokumori's picture

Thanks

Thank you Robert. Very good point. I will try to come up with some name based on the idea of theming.