Translation Team/Pootle Projects

Localizers working on a new language project often want to know which project(s) they need to complete to make Sugar user interface (UI) usable in their own language. This page attempts to give a little background on the projects as they are organized on the Pootle server. For a more authoritative description of how Sugar is structured, you should also read other pages on this wiki, including Taxonomy and others.

Since the questions of "What are the most important PO files?" or "In what order should we complete the translation work?" are closely related, this page will list the projects on the Pootle server in a recommended order of completion along with some of the reasoning behind those recommendations. They are just guidance and any localizer can decide for themselves which proejcts they think are most important. For instance, the e-toys project localization is hosted on the Sugar Labs / OLPC Pootle server and someone interested only in etoys (but not necessarily on a Sugar-based system might want to work on that project first, but it is to be hoped that they would also consider contributing some of their skills to other projects hosted here as well.

The really short version of this is in the FAQ here.

Terminology

It is strongly recommended that language teams begin by working on the Terminology project glossary.po file. This project consists of commonly occuring strings gathered from other projects that appear multiple times across projects (e.g. Copy, Stop, Cancel, Edit, etc.). It is this project that will populate the translation suggestions in the right hand sidebar of the Pootle interface.

One important reason to complete this project first is to gain consensus on terms used in Sugar (Activity, Journal) as well as some common computer terms that may or may not exist in languages that do not yet have a rich technical vocabulary. Please note that the fact that the TamTam suite of activities is broken up into 4 activities in the Honey project causes musical terms to be somewhat over-represented in the Terminology project.

The Sugar core, Sucrose equals Glucose plus Fructose

Hopefully you've read the Taxonomy page and all of this will make sense to you already. If you want an XO laptop to run Sugar (or to use SoaS), you will need to translate matched pairs of Glucose and Fructose projects (i.e. Glucose/Fructose or Glucose 0.82/Fructose 0.82).

Selecting a matched pair of Glucose and Fructose projects to start working on should be done carefully and with a clear understanding of what Sugar version will be used in the deployment. For many XO deployments, Sugar version 0.84 may be the latest stable version that loads easily on the XO (although work continues on porting/adapting newer versions of Sugar to run on the XO 1.0 and 1.5 laptops).

The good news is that while some strings have moved around with restructuring of the code, many, many of the Sugar UI strings remain the same from release to release.

Glucose (and related versioned projects)

This is the most current version of Glucose (0.87 until Spring 2010 release cycle, at which point it will be renumbered 0.88, according to the 0.88/Roadmap).

Glucose 0.84

Previous stable release of the Glucose project. Released April 2009. See 0.84 timeline here.

Glucose 0.82

An early stable release of the Glucose project. Released August 2008. See 0.82 timeline here. These files are being phased out as newer builds are strongly recommended.

Fructose (and related versioned projects)

This is the most current version of Fructose (0.87 until Spring 2010 release cycle, at which point it will be renumbered 0.88 according to the 0.88/Roadmap). Fructose contains a number of activities that are considered core to the use of the Sugar UI as a learning tool.

Fructose 0.84

Previous stable release of the Fructose project. Released April 2009. See 0.84 timeline here.

Fructose 0.82

An early stable release of the Fructose project. Released August 2008. See 0.82 timeline here. These files are being phased out as newer builds are strongly recommended.

Honey

Honey is the name given to the collection of independently developed Sugar Activities. These offer many different functions, but all of them are essentially optional, although they are collectively an important part of the Sugar learning environment.

Etoys

This is a rather large project.

OLPC Content

These are strings related to an OLPC effort to develop some multi-language PR materials. This is definitely optional for XO laptop function.

OLPC Software

These are strings related to switching between the Sugar GUI desktop and the GNOME GUI desktop. Do not mistake this as being the only project needed to run an XO laptop. Glucose and Fructose are essential for any XO laptop deployment.

Other projects of interest (not locally hosted)

FLOSS Manuals

A number of helpful guides for Sugar / OLPC efforts have been written. Translating FLOSS Manuals is somewhat different than using Pootle, but these books stay fairly static so they are well worth the effort of localizing. FM began using a new Free Software suite, called booki, that they developed for collaborative authoring, editing, translation, and publication. The older site is

http://en.flossmanuals.net/

with translations at

http://translate.flossmanuals.net/

and the newer site is

http://booki.flossmanuals.net/

If you would like to translate any of these manuals, please join the FM-Discuss mailing list and introduce yourself and your interests.

Mokurai is recruiting translators, particularly to Spanish to begin with, but to every language needed in the long term.

Scratch

Scratch localization used to be hosted by Sugar Labs / OLPC and they are still are vibrant part of our community, but they have decided to host their own localization infrastructure. Learn more about it here:

http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Translation

Pootle

The Pootle server that hosts the Pootle UI strings is:

http://pootle.locamotion.org/

The Translate project team that develops Pootle uses the following e-mail list in the same way we use the Sugar Labs / OLPC Localization list.

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum=translate-pootle

We have in the past hosted a set of pootle.po files locally and sent locally translated Pootle UI strings to the upstream. In general, we believe that new language projects should work directly on the Pootle hosting instance for localizing the Pootle UI itself.

This Pootle server also hosts a number of other projects for the ANLoc project in African languages and the Decathlon project. One example is the TuxPaint activity which is localized on this server and available as a .xo bundle from ASLO.

AbiWord

The Sugar word processor activity "Write" is a derivative of AbiWord. Contributions to L10n of the upstream project are a nice "thank you" for their work.

http://abisource.com/contribute/translate/

GCompris

Over one hundred GCompris games have been packaged as Actvities and they are featured on ASLO

GCompris localization is hosted here: http://l10n.gnome.org/module/gcompris/