Introduce yourself
Universal Subtitles
This is place for any person who wants to introduce himself/herself to
this group.
I'll kick it off by introducing myself.
I'm Abood. I developed interest in Universal Subtitles a few months
ago and I was glad to catch up while it was still in it's very early
stages. I gave feedback every once in a while, so the good people at
Universal Subtitles asked if I'd like to help out on a somewhat
broader range for some time as a volunteer. So I said yes sure I'd
like to.
Long story short, I opened this Google Group as a request and some
day, someone will eventually take over. Rest assured, I will continue
to be involved with this awesome project. I'm also offering feedback
to the Transifex website and reporting that on #Transifex IRC channel,
but that's another story.
Finally, I'm not a programmer, developer, etc. But I will be - soon.
Thank you for reading!
Holmes Wilson
Yeah, we wanted to get a list of everyone together so that we would have a place to discuss work on localization efforts for Universal Subtitles.
We almost are ready to release a new version of Universal Subtitles (the 0.9.2 milestone) and want to make sure that everybody is ready to begin the new round of translation work, and that the translations you have already made get integrated into this release and a smart way.
One question I have to get started is: is everyone clear on how to submit translations in transifex? Are there any points that are not clear, or has anyone had any problems?
--Holmes
calmansi
Oddly, I can only see the "reply to the author" option, so I added the
list's address in CC as I can't modify the "To" line.
I am a Swiss freelance translator job-wise, and captioner/subtitler
mainly by conviction, though I have also been offered a few subtitling
jobs.
I discovered subtitling via the Webmultimediale.org project late in
2006. Back then, they were exclusively using SMIL and I pestered the
others for an explanation of how it worked: as I am widely tech
illiterate, it took a long while, but they were very patient :D Though
I joined that project because of the accessibility confered by
captions, what struck me was the potential for education: a teacher
could make a video with a class in schwytzertütsch or other minority
language, caption it, translate the captions, say in proper German or
English, and then other folks could translate the subtitle file in
other languages.
My first go at online captioning was with Mojiti, when it was very
much an annotation tool more than a captioning one, and which
disappeared soon after offering the captioning option. At least I had
saved the .srt files.
Then I tried a few other online captioning tools, some of which I
still use for the first transcript if the video is short or if I have
to keep the subtitling private.
I heard of Universal Subtitles via the international Creative Commons
team, who had adopted it. Its first advantage, for me, is that it is
free (libre) and open. And the second is precisely the possibility to
translate the site and widget. I mean, I just saw a video tutorial
about a German videogame by a 13-year old who thoroughly hates - and
hence is not very good at - learning German in school, but has no
issue with using the German interface of the game. But for most,
captioning/subtitling is not quite as fun as playing a videogame, so
it is better to remove a possible language barrier. And it's more
pleasant to participate in that when a project is free (libre) and
open than for a proprietary project.
Best
Claude
dw1Rianto
Claude Almansi
It's really impressive that you joined the translation team, created
the translation page for Indonesian *and* joined this list and posted
here about an issue, all in a few hours: thanks and congratulations.
Between your lines, re:
On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 7:53 AM, dw1Rianto <dwiri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello everyone! Abood and Holmes :)
> Really enjoy joining the team. May I suggest. I hope there are several minor
> bugs fixed on the transifex, so we are on the countries that do not use
> apostrophe symbol for count many or to show the ownership or abbreviation
> (comma above) could easily click the Save & Exit button right after
> completing the translation without worries about losing it.
I'll reply about the apostrophe symbol below. Re the Save & Exit
button: though each string gets saved automatically when you move to
another one, it is important to click that button when you want to
stop translating for a while, otherwise the translation page will
appear as "locked" to other members of the relevant language team:
this is a new thing introduced by Transifex in July lest 2 people
translating simultaneously overwrite each other's work: see Dimitris
Glezos' explanation on the Transifex list, July 18, 2011
<http://groups.google.com/group/transifex-devel/browse_thread/thread/4c2b1c37b348c79c>.
Re:
> For an example:
> Donny's (en_EN) > Donny (id_ID), OR We'd like > Kami ingin. As you can see,
> we are not using it on Bahasa Indonesia (id_ID).
That's OK: say there are 2 English strings which both would have the
same translation in Bahasa Indonesia, just give the same translation
in both cases.
The real problem is when one English string could mean different
things in another language: this often happens with the French and
Italian translations, for instance. Sometimes the "details" link that
appears in mouseover under the English string gives enough context
info to choose the right form, but not always. When it does not,
please describe the translation issue in the "Suggestion" part of the
string, whose link also appears in mouseover under the English string.
With the idea of gathering these problematic strings in one place, I
also made a Google form,
<http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform%3Fformkey%3DdEt0aE05b0toYm52UVJ6RDhFOG94bFE6MQ%26ifq>,
which feeds a spreadsheet,
<http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc%3Fkey%3DtKthM9oKhbnvQRzD8E8oxlQ%23gid%3D0.>,
which is publicly viewable, searchable and downloadable, and is in
turn linked to in the form (see the "What about gathering problematic
strings in one place?" thread
<http://groups.google.com/group/universalsubtitles/browse_thread/thread/2317d3c22914aca2>).
But I'm aware that filling a form while one is translating is a pain.
So if you just indicate the issue in the "Suggestion" part, as above,
I can then go through the translation and collect that info myself
into the spreadsheet.
Re:
> And one more thing, why do we need second language identification? In this
> case, I see Indonesia (id) and Indonesian (Indonesia) with id_ID? And best
> of the best, name it Bahasa Indonesia (id_ID) if it's possible too :D
According to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Indonesia>,
there are over 700 languages in Indonesia. So probably, Transifex
wanted to cover the possibility of someone requesting to translate
into another language than Bahasa Indonesia. If you wish, you could
raise this issue - and other ones depending on the Transifex set-up in
the <http://groups.google.com/group/transifex-devel/> group.
However, I do agree with you that this multiplication of sublanguages
can at times be a problem. As one of the maintainers of the
translation of Universal Subtitles, when bichOec (Eric Guzman)
requested the creation of a "Spanish (Ecuador)" team, I asked him if
he would mind first joining forces with the "Spanish (Spain)" team, so
that we could then duplicate that translation for the Ecuadorian
version of Spanish he could edit, rather than restarting from scratch.
He graciously accepted.
Best
Claude