Translation

Global WordPress Translation Day in Tokyo

September 30 was the third Global WordPress Translation Day (GWTD3).

Global WordPress Translation Day 3

649 translators for 60 different locales added 93,179 translations over the 24-hour period. 346 projects (core, meta, plugins, themes, and apps) got new language pack created as a result.

Meetups & Online Events in Japan

In Japan, there were four local meetups in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Ogijima. We also had several online participants on WordSlack, the Slack instance for the Japanese WordPress community.

We held the Translation Day event in Tokyo at Gengo office for the second time following the last year. Active translation contributors Mayuko (Mayo) & Akira (atachibana) were there, and we had a nice mix of new and experienced polyglots.

“How to Make Strings Translator-Friendly” session

From 11 am, three of us did a live session on for the Crowdcast streaming.

The idea of the session came out from a question from WordCamp Tokyo Contributor Day participant. He asked how we should translate ALL CAPS, and some of us said: “we actually don’t have a good way to translate it in Japanese (because the Japanese language doesn’t make use of capitalization)”. Then, Mirucon said the best thing we can do is to try letting developers know not to use language-specific expressions such as this.

Mayuko, Akira, and I gathered some examples of strings that we can’t translate well and I categorized them into four types. I hope this is useful for anyone writing strings for WordPress, its themes & plugins, and any other products to be localized.

Making strings translator-friendly can not only help translators but improves the overall quality of the text for all users. Precise and unambiguous instructions and UI labels can be a great feature on its own.

It’s Fun to Work Together

I was only able to stay until 3 pm since I have kids waiting at home, but I’m glad I was able to join the offline event even for a short time. I enjoyed working side by side with other translators — it’s not something I experience much, as a member of a distributed company.

But working with a remote team was also a fun part of the event. It was great to see the GWTD3 organizing team put together the whole thing with strong teamwork (I’m listed as one of the team members but I had a minimum involvement due to my early maternity leave, the hard work was done by everyone else!).

Suggesting translation is one of the easiest ways to start contributing to the WordPress open source project for those who understand multiple languages.

You don’t have to wait until the next Translation Day to get started 😄

WPTD3-wapuu-512

Migrating Poedit Translation Memory to a Different Computer (Mac)

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Poedit stores its translation memory (TM) locally. As I was switching to a new machine, I wondered what’s the safest way to migrate it.

Poedit Preference Screen: Translatin Memory

After I sent a support request, the software author Václav quickly got back to me. According to him, this is the instruction.

  1. Install Poedit on a new machine.
  2. Make hidden files shown on both machines (through Finder or Terminal.app).
  3. With both Poedit apps closed, copy the following directory from your old machine to a place you can access from the other machine (e.g. Dropbox):
    /Users/xxx/Library/Application/Support/Poedit/TranslationMemory
  4. Move the directory to the same location of your new machine.

That’s it! You may be prompted to confirm replacing write.lock and segments.gen files – I said yes to both and it worked fine.

If you are not familiar with dealing with hidden files, it’s better to make hidden files invisible again.

Václav added:

Copying the folder should work fine (even if it’s between platforms), the only thing that would be dangerous would be putting it into a shared folder and accessing from two computers at once.

Translation memory import/export may be added to Poedit in the future, but meanwhile, I hope this is useful!