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Translating Free Software?

Posted by Cliff on from the something-from-nothing dept.

InnerPeace Volunteers asks: "We'd like to translate our free software into other languages besides English. Our total budget for this is 0. Any suggestions on how to get this done?" The hardest part of getting people to translate anything, sometimes, is finding the talent to do it. Once done, it should be fairly easy to break things down into pieces and assign them to each person. Documentation is easy to translate, but how might code be best (re-)designed to make translating the programs internal dialog less of a bear for those working on the project? Is I18N still the best route for a multi-lingual program, or are there better options?

1 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What are you translating? by Katajanmarja · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Assuming you're content with just a native in the language you want to translate to, versus
    a native and a professional, you might not even need the money part. You have interesting/fun, open source / GNU-style-free software, and a decent internationalization scheme which allows translators not to mess with code to get their work done? Add a note to various places, like in the 'about..', that you're looking for translators for this and that language, or "any". Last time I had a sudden urge to contribute, I picked up one project I found from SourceForge which was done in a jiffy, and one bigger game which I'm still working on.

    My main problem then was that from SF, I found only one which seemed that it might have any interest in a Finnish translation. And with the bigger project outside SF, I knew they wanted localizations but was intimidated by the size of it: "what if my translation isn't good enough for them?"