Translating Free Software?

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?

Comments

What are you translating?

[Oily Tuna]

Your small collection of HTML files???

To be honest, it doesn't look like a very big task apart from the actual english->SomethingElse step. Cliff's comments are correct - but not relevent to what I see on your site. Step 1 is obviously a little note on your homepage asking for volunteers to do the translating.
I'm sure for a few $$$ you could persuade some language students at the local college to help.

I've been involved with the translation of an HTML based application - commericially and for an international company, so the translation bit was easy - and HTML is a pain to deal with.
It was hard for the translators to distinguish between things that should be translated and things that shouldn't be because the content, the formatting and the scripting is so intertwined. The scripting problems were eased by going the traditional route of splitting localisable strings into a separate file and loading controls dynamically at run time. The solution to the rest was good QA.

Re:What are you translating?

[Katajanmarja]

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?"

Try the existing teams

[Otter]

KDE and Gnome (and some other projects, I'm sure) have extensive translation teams. You might want to approach the respective leaders of those teams and see if they'd let you send a call for volunteers to the relevant mailing lists.