Bad translations: what to do?

For my language - portuguese - there are bad errors in the time indicators for game, which can appear in some different places. I am talking about something like:

“3 day 25 hour” (what i actually see is “3 Dia 24 Hora”)

This is very bad! And if in english is the same i just wrote, it is very bad too. Why singular and plural variations are not being used? And why those capital letters? Wrong too, i think.

So, i would like to ask for this improvement for my language, at least. But it should be easily be solved for several languages.

3 Likes

Direct Link:

By clicking Help translate, you can register at Pootle and improve translation.

Direct Link:
https://translate.online-go.com

5 Likes

Are the changes applied instantly? Is there an information page about translations?

1 Like

Don’t know about that, but you can contact Pootle (see top right corner on Pootle page) and ask them.

https://pootle.translatehouse.org

1 Like

I will do that. I imagined that someone from here would know the detail, anyway. Thank you for the attention!

2 Likes

Maybe someone knows more, but one need a bit of patience, as this is a forum, not a chat and it can take some time to get the answer you are searching for.

1 Like

I know, Groin. And i think it was a big luck that my message got the first answer in so few minutes. If my words before seems hasty, it was not my intention. Sorry.

3 Likes

In my opinion, not that many people were involved in translation so it can indeed take some time. Besides It’s night time now in western Countries… Anyway thanks for your interest.

Edit: there is a bit more in the documentation
https://github.com/online-go/online-go.com/wiki/Internationalization-and-Localization

3 Likes

The time Translation problem occured with german language as it appears in this topic:
https://forums.online-go.com/t/wrong-translation-on-time-german/25654

Maybe @anoek could have a look for Portuguese language too?

If I remember correctly from the Greek translation there is not any significant downtime. Once you switch to another language, it takes the language pack from the Pootle database, if I remember correctly. I hadn’t noticed any significant time delay, but it has been almost two years since I last did this.

It is a very user-friendly system where you are given select phrases and terms to translate. However you do not get any context on where exactly your text will be located, so there was a small issue in figuring out small terms sometimes like minute/minutes and where exactly they belong/appear in the website.
So, I would guess that, at least, explains why the words have capital letters.

3 Likes

No need to do that. Those folks write the (open source) software, we run and use it, they don’t have anything to do with the update process on our site or any sort of operations.

The site is updated with new translations when I do an update, so there’s a manual step that happens along with various checks so I can monitor vandalism and that sort of stuff.

Anyways, please feel free to fix those up, that would be awesome. Once it’s ready let me know and I’ll get it pushed up.

Thanks for your willingness to translate!

10 Likes

The time Translation problem occured with german language as it appears in this topic:
Wrong translation on time / german

Maybe @anoek could have a look for Portuguese language too?

The situation described in that thread is slightly different. But i think it could have the exact same cause. I say this because, yesterday, i translated and/or corrected/guessed¹ everything that contained the string “dia” (a search for it includes results where there is a word with these 3 letters inside it). Anyway, there were not that many results. I checked them all.

¹ I made a few corrections of things that seemed misstranslations - i mean, wrong words, and not just small correction of case and word variations. Anyway, after everything done, i saw that it is indicated the language is “pt.po”, which means “portuguese from Portugal”. I was born and live in Brasil (we write it with an “s” here; i refrain from the “z” change, for some cultural reasons; if people from other countries will find it hard to speak correctly it or not, is another problem; “Brazil”, written this way, is still spoken clearly wrong by English born and speaking people… so… i prefer to forget that “z”).

Could “pt.po” explain some errors i saw? This is kind of hard. I help translating projects since a lot of years, with not small contributions, several times. The differences i always saw were minor, and the understanding rarely is compromised between people from Brasil or from Portugal (and sometimes, from other pt language countries too, although i talked with people from them only a few times). I even helped Wikipedia (pt), for some time. In Wikipedia, only one portuguese version is allowed to exist. And it is not bad. Wikipedia (or Wikipédia, for us, in pt) aims to be a “free for all source for all the human knowledge” ever produced. So, editions and new articles from everyone is welcome. But none should make changes that remove words just because in the editor’s language variation the words are different. We have to deal with all the variations, eventually. And if the words, names or anything is different enough to make the idea hard to understand for some people, a comment should be made about this, giving all the names and showing where they are used. So, i eventually find articles with words and small sets of names just for country uses. But the article is only one, and it is reached by multiple URLs, if needed. This happens with English from UK and other countries too. i use english Wiktionary a lot, and it mentions, many times, differences from UK and USA words or spelling. I really like that. (:

My english here has many little errors, bad details… but it is informal. I know them… but i still prefer to write this way, here. “This is very bad… how can you complain about that Z, then?” … well… both languages are alive, in use by hundreds of millions of people. They change. They influence each other. So… let’s not fight about anything. Calm discussions of reasons or point of views are welcome, and possibly culturally enriching.

Let me finish this 20 pages post… kkkkk :wink:

3 Likes

As i (prolixly) said in the previous post, i found a few possible explanations for those wrong case details. :+1:t4:

1 Like

Yesterday, i did missing tranlations and a few changes or corrections for things with “dia”/day. Today, i did it for “hora”/hour. I think you can check them and update them.

One question: when some question or information about the source to be translate is needed, what is best to do? Ask here in Meta forum? Create a new bug/issue with it?

Helping Vivaldi browser (great browser! I am loving using it… before it, i used Firefox, but Firefox before some drastic changes the project made; but some sites refuse to work in this “not current” version of it - even when they do not need anything actually new to work, they are just basic sites! . . . :roll_eyes: ) being translated, i discovered the Weblate translation system, used there. It is reallty good to use. And something MUCH MUCH useful it has is to make possible to add comments in each translating text, for each language; and it also shows source code comments (possibly directed to Weblate, i imagine that not every kind of comment is desired to appear where strings are used. For these features, i wonder if changing the system used by OGS is possible, and a nice idea.

Below, a few words about Weblate. Please use an automatic translator, here. These paragraphs are not what we see in the official site front page. Both are nice to read.

O Weblate é uma ferramenta de tradução baseada na web com robusta integração de controle de versão. Ele possui uma interface limpa e simples, propagação de traduções através de componentes, verificações de qualidade e associação automática aos arquivos fontes.

Mais informações sobre o Weblate podem ser encontradas em weblate.org.

O Weblate é um software livre criado por voluntários e aceita doações.

For translations, I use wordreference. I think it minimizes errors in meaning.

I second that Wiktionary is notoriously bad.

Don’t have Google so use yandex, not that bad in fact.

I strongly disagree with everyone that says Wiktionary is bad. The English version of if (there is one for each language) is amazingly deep for english meanings, and still contains a lot of words from many other languages. The Wiktionaries in other languages will not be as complete for a lack of people contributing to it. For example, i do not use portuguese Wiktionary to look words in my own language - portuguese. I use another one. I contribute with Wikt(pt) sometimes, but the whole world contributes to Wikt(en) - including me! -, so, there is a big difference in the speed of development.

The translations, changes and corrections I did are still waiting for you… I see no difference yet.

anoek has a lot on his plate, these things don’t always happen instantly.

1 Like