Most of my web/tech/software-related projects address my own needs first and foremost, so my work on update for the Russian localisation stands out, as I’ve never used software localisation for anything and actually prefer my soft interface to be in English.
In this instance, I’ve decided to take this project on, for 3 reasons: it provided a somewhat new experience, no one else to do it instead and feeling of accomplishment, that I always get after a neat project wrap-up.
Lets explore these reasons in some details.
- New experience
- Despite doing occasional translations, I’ve never worked on a software/web-site localisation project by myself before.
After getting a small taste of it for adminBranding plugin, I’ve decided to try my hand at something more substantial. - Who else?
- Zenphoto Russian localisation was last updated in time for v1.4.14 release back in the January of 2018, since than CMS was greatly reworked and update of strings to be translated from the source revealed that we had roughly 55% of stuff translated, and in reality even less, as Poedit did fuzzy matches which needed to be reviewed and cleaned up.
As I am probably the only active contributor with native Russian, it was a logical step to take this project upon myself and maybe learn something useful in the process.
- Accomplishment after a work well done
- Let’s face it, it’s my main reason for doing anything really, and this was no exception.
It was a relatively small project with a clear end in sight (get to 100%, review all marked strings), which can be worked on solely by myself, at my own pace and my own discretion.
Process of ru_RU locale update
I’ve started off with creating a terminology dictionary for existing translation, reviewed it and decided on what vocabulary will stay and what needs to be changed.
I’ve extracted missing strings and did auto-translation of them, to speed up my work (used Yandex for that, which yielded a pretty good result overall).
After some code clean-up, I’ve combined my .po files, marked all as “needs work” in Poedit and started my review process:
- First, I’ve sorted strings by the source to go through most common strings and impose my chosen vocabulary for future reference.
- After that, I’ve sorted everything by file order and went string by string, while checking with code occurrences.
- In a few instances, I’ve checked translations to German and French, as meaning was too ambiguous in English.
- My Terminology library with not just translations for words, but even turns of phrases came in handy at this stage, as I was able to unify phrasing even where there’s differences in English, due to different authors of plugins.
- After reaching my goal of 100% strings translated and reviewed, I’ve tested my work on my demo site and tweaked a few obvious things here and there.
- After that, I did a quick final spell-check, to catch typos.
Right now localisation file is merged into Zenphoto on Github and I can take some time off, to clear my mind and get a fresh perspective.
At some later time, I plan to do more research on currently commonly used terminology for web-galleries in Russian and adopt some of those conventions into my version.
Other than that, I plan to go through most common third-party plugins and themes and do Russian translations for those too.
Largely, because “Why not?”
