Commotion Localization

Welcome to the Commotion localization guide. This quick guide will walk you through the steps and procedures involved in translating Commotion.

In order to make Commotion available to communities all over the world, we are localizing it in multiple languages. We are currently looking for volunteer translators to participate in the French, Spanish and Arabic localization of the project. We are especially interested in professionals who have experience working with technical texts.

Sign Up

The first step to get started is to sign up for the Commotion L10n projects. We have two projects –

Commotion Documentation and Commotion User Interface – both hosted on Transifex, an online collaborative translation tool.

If you already have an account on Transifex, you only need to join the language team(s) of your choice. If you are new, then you need to create an account first.

Translating

Online Translation

Once you have signed up with Transifex, you will be required to join a language team. You can join as many teams as you want. Transifex breaks up translatable content into sentences or phrases, called strings. The strings are displayed in the form of a list, and you translate them one by one. If you are unsure of how to translate a string, you can make a suggestion instead of committing a translation. You can also skip the string altogether and move on to a new one.

There are many aids available for you as a translator within the online editor. You can explore them on the Transifex support website.

Offline Translation

It is also possible to translate files offline. For this, you will have to download a file, translate it using an offline translation tool and upload it back when you are done. You have the option to "lock" the file, in which case no translator other than you will be able to work on the strings contained in that file.

There are several choices with regard to tools for offline translation. If the source files are in HTML format, then you can use OmegaT. If the files are in the pot format, then you can use Poedit, Virtaal or OmegaT. You are free to use any other tool of your choice.

Communicating

Collaboration is the backbone of the open-source community. Interacting with your co-translators will not only help you engage in meaningful conversations around your work, but will also give you a feel of the open-source community at large. The communication channels available to you include:

  1. Transifex
    You can communicate with other members of your language team right within Transifex by visiting the concerned language team and clicking on the Discussions tab.
     
  2. Mailing list
    You can subscribe to our mailing list and remain updated about all the developments related to Commotion i18n. Of course, you can also initiate any discussion. commotion-i18n@lists.opentechinstitute.org
     
  3. IRC
    Another option is to join our IRC channel commotion-i18n on the irc.freenode.net server.
     
  4. Other ways to get involved with Commotion
    Join our mailing lists:

Join us on IRC:
#commotion on the freenode.net server