Cyril Wendl, 10^th of January 2014

In October 2012, I committed to translate Warmshowers.org (referred to hereafter as WS) to German, my mother tongue. I was asked subsequently to take charge of the translations. Since this is the first translation report in the history of WS, I’ll extend the time span of its content to the beginning of my charge.

Since fall 2012, 9 new languages have been added to WS:

• German
• Polish
• Italian
• Japanese
• Chinese
• Farsi
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian
• Turkish

The following translations existed already before fall 2012:

• French
• Spanish
• Portuguese

I’ll hereinafter endeavor to classify all existent translations of WS amongst the following categories:

• Barely begun
• On the way
• Almost complete
• Complete

The references for the latter categories are mainly:

• The translation status page of the corresponding language (http://[language].warmshowers.org/translation/status (only accessible for translators))
• The user mails (in the user settings of WS)
• An overall impression of interface

 

• Translations might be facilitated with regards to interface. As I have uttered repeatedly, I’d very much fancy the introduction of an on-line list of important interface in analogy to the content (content marked as “important to translate” appears on the aforementioned status page), so that translators (and I) don’t have to roam WS for lose strings and have a better overview. Even better would be a page with interface strings that disappear once they’re translated and reappear when translation needs to be updated.
• The wiki might be improved, reread and shortened (avoid redundancy).
• More frequent scrutinizing of the translation and notifications of the translators what remains to be done
• The user mails, menus and some other pieces of web content have been translated hitherto by means of a Word file. This worked well in most cases but many translators haven’t sent me the file yet. I opine that it would be clearer to translate everything on line, the best case being on WS directly. This could perhaps be done be assigning new privileges to the translators or, preliminarily, by simple pieces of translatable content.
• The introduction of language detection would be to my great fancy.
• I have recently realized the creation of a CMS and I aspire to pursue my efforts by embarking on the development of WS in order to attempt to realize some of the abovementioned improvements.
• Generally, I was astounded to relish a very reliable and committed collaboration on behalf of the translators, albeit there have been some difficulties in contacting certain translators, notabene those whose translation is less advances. It is very important to maintain efforts to keep translations complete and, if necessary, to find new translators for the continuously lagging translations.