Translating Haiku user interface to Portuguese (Portugal)

I am currently working on the Portuguese translation for the Haiku user interface. I have been reviewing some pending translations and adding a lot of new ones. When i started it was about 21% done. I was able to raise it to 31% and I will be working on it for some time.

I am curious about the process. After translations are added in Pootle, when do they arrive to the users? Is there a minimum completion ratio for them to be released? Will it be deployed immediately through HaikuDepot, or will it have to wait toā€¦ ahemā€¦ Beta2?:roll_eyes:

By the way, is there anyone around that is fluent in Portuguese (Portugal) and wants to join us in the translation effort? Itā€™s a lot of small chunks of text, but if there were more people, it could be finished much faster.

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Pootle translations are regularly exported to the Haiku code base. They appear in the nightly images. Weā€™ll have some of the commits to the ā€˜masterā€™ branch cherry-picked for the ā€˜r1beta1ā€™ branch. Those translation will certainly be among those.

Every once in a while the r1beta1 branch will probably get a build and people will get the update through SoftwareUpdater. We wonā€™t have to wait until the next beta release (ā€œr1beta2ā€), but I donā€™t know the timeline for those incremental updates.

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Ok, I canā€™t wait to see it in Portuguese here :slight_smile:
I am also translating some of the third-party applications in Polyglot. BePdf is already finished.

But Haiku, with its more than 17000 words, is a much bigger task. It would be a lot easier if we could join a small group of Portuguese translators to speed up the process. Hello, Portugal? Anyone? :wink:

I thought PT_br was already included and thus also PT_pt since itā€™s a variant and you only need to add translations for where PT_pt differs? I know there was a thread about this before beta1.

Brazilian Portuguese is my second language, having lived in Minas Gerais, MG Brazil for a few years.

Well, in the beta, if I select Portuguese the default seems to be English, whenever there is no translation available. In macOS, I am able to add both PT_pt and PT_br, in order to get more applications in Portuguese, regardless of the variant. It makes sense, because itā€™s the same language with very little differences and no problems in understanding it. And PT_br has already a great part of the translation done, much more than PT_pt.

But in Haiku it only accepts one variant. If I have PT_pt and try to add PT_br in the settings, it replaces. I can however choose two different languages, like Portuguese and English. I think it should allow us to add and order the variants regardless of the language they belong to. Is it a bug?

Unfortunately, I think there is no easy way to migrate all that work. It would help a lot, for instance, if all the current Brazilian translations could be added as suggestions for the strings that still donā€™t have a Portuguese translation. Reviewing is much easier than translating, and it would save some time and effort. And by using the suggestion approach, we would still be able to fix any language incongruence or any different terms, as needed, before committing.

CC @PulkoMandy; why donā€™t we allow this, especially if macOS does? Is this a bug?

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Yeah I was under the impression that as long as a primary language had over 70% then the secondary language would get pulled in regardless and anything not translated in a secondary selected language defaulted to the primary one. I donā€™t think you are actually supposed to do full translations in the variant language at all, only where there are differencesā€¦ as it is duplicated work.

Am I imagining that there was a poll about language inclusion awhile back somewhere I couldnā€™t find it.

You can configure Pootle (in your user preferences) to show the original string in other languages besides English. Then I think itā€™s easy to review them and copy them into the translated section?

This is supposed to be handled at the system level by having a ā€œPTā€ translation (with all common strings), and then a PT_br and PT_pt specialization (with everything thatā€™s different). We did not make use of the feature yet, however.

The Locale Kit already allows one kind of fallback: If you select PT_br or PT_pt, it will automatically fallback to non-country-specific PT (and this is what we use for most languages to actually, work, eg. we have an FR translation, but no FR_fr).

So, according to this original plan, what we should do is:

  • Put the portuguese translation in PT catalogs,
  • Have PT_br catalogs contain just what changes from PT_pt

This allows users to not need to select all language variants when picking a language.

However, this can be inconvenient for Pootle translators (they have to decide when to migrate a translation from PT_br to generic PT, for example). So maybe we need to give up on this and instead leave it up to the user to set this up.

Well, for me, having the Brazilian variant loaded automatically where there are no Portuguese strings is fine. But I know about other users that prefer a different approach: if there is no PT_pt, use English. The system should be flexible enough and transparent to allow for this fine grained setup.

Regarding to Pootle, if there is a way to see PT_br as if they were suggestions waiting for approval thatā€™s perfect, as it allows to speed up my work and still take care of any terminology and other linguistic differences as needed.

In Pootle there is one setting for alternative languages, not sure if itā€™s that. I get a error when I try to save it, though.

Thatā€™s it yes. Worked last time I used itā€¦

I have been using WebPositive most of the time, since I hoped it would offer the most Haiku-native experience. However, some elements donā€™t show up on screen (like the heart icon here in the forum, and suggestions from other languages in Pootle). I like to check how some ambiguous strings are being translated in other languages/variants (French - usually one of the most precise versions IMO, Spanish, Catalan, Italian).

I am now trying Otter Browser and QupZilla. QupZilla gets the best score of the three in https://html5test.com/ and seems to display the Brazilian versions in Pootle. So, having at least one variant available is a nice help. :wink: I will try to use it and see how it goes.

Try Dooble as well.

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For some reason I was having very unstable connection. So I wasnā€™t able to see it it works for me, yet.

And while QupZilla displays the Brazilian strings, the keyboard does not work properly, it adds weird characters when entering accented letters. I am back to WebPositive, and wishing that it gets better at displaying the missing images and text blocks.

We are 50% done. Some important parts, like DriveSetup, HaikuDepot and WebPositive are now 100% translated to Portuguese, and should soon find their way to all Portuguese speaking Haiku users.

Still a long way to go, however. Are there any Portuguese people around, who maybe could want to join this effort?