[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] Help to translate Evergreen to, Spanish (Mexico)

[Kivilahti Olli-Antti]

Nice prep-speech!

We are currently struggling with Evergreen's internationalization as well and it seems to be riddled with bugs. We are squashing them though with the help of the community, and would welcome your help as well, regarding we have a common goal.
You can start from here
http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=evergreen-admin:customizations:i18n
and then translate the .po's with your weapon-of-choice.
It takes a lot of time.

For us it went like this:
we outsourced the translation to a 3rd party while providing support in technical matters. for ~9000 translateable text entries (strings) we paid like <6000€
(Don't do that! Translating evergreen is really difficult as there is no way to get any context for your localizable strings, other than a long process of pushing .po's down the localization toolchain and rebuilding your staff client and server. The quality of the translation will be poor/horrible and requires such special vocabulary which you cannot find from 3rd parties)
Currently we have spent around 2 weeks (80h) for technical translation support and to automate some of the handicaps in refreshing your translations (in a user friendly way).

3w 4d is the logged time for our in-house translation specialist for the work fixing translation errors and keeping the translations up-to-date. The total effort is much higher, as our worklog's are quite unaccurate from that period of time (last summer). Could be 5w 3d in-house work to fix those outsourced translations (2 persons working occasionally) and update from v2.2 to v2.3.

Well we did the translation and started wondering where are our translated strings, as there were really many places in Eg where we couldn't get translated strings to show, like the edit patron-view (which is pretty crucial).

To dig deeper into that we hired Pasi. I was suscepting some sloppy coder forgot to make strings translateable via the localization toolchain, but the truth was much worse than I anticipated. We get some wild bugs and totally inconsistent behavior pulling stuff from the database. Well we are fixing those issues and it seems we need to translate some 1000ish strings more, so not bad. Good thing we stopped working with the 3rd party and established our own translation capability.

Currently we have spent around 2w1d to fix/report issues related to internationalization.
No wonder the Canadians use English as well.


Considering the manual, we are working on that as well. Most of the time is spent on understanding how Evergreen actually works. It looks like out of 4 weeks, only 1 week is spent on actively writing the documentation, rest is focused on finding out how EG works and how should we use Evergreen to best fit our existing workflows.
I would believe that according to the project tracking we conduct, to translate & test & adapt & QA manual contents from different consortias it takes around 6 calendar man-months, but we have the luxury of having ample time to get aquainted with EG.

BTW. Time estimates are recorded working hours, and we enforce a policy to log only time you know you spent. So if you are dicking around doing nothing that is not logged as work (or you might have to so many things at once you have no idea what you did). It gives a pretty realistic view on how time is spent and WHAT IS ACHIEVED. Not sure if records are very accurate, but we got from 20-40% deviation for work logged vs calendar time spent last summer.
We are working hard to close the gap. But you can expect to add 10-60% to the worklog data I provided to get a realistic calendar time spent, depending on how hardworking you/your staff is.
Wow, that's pseudoscience I just wrote!

But make sure you test everything you translate, as not all of the things documented in manuals actually work, or we are unable to get them to work.

If you want to ask for more details about the bugs troubling internationalization you can check https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen
or email        pasi   D.ot.   kallinen     {a.t}     jns     t.O.D     fi
as he (and some core members) has been pushing the developers to enforce proper internationalization methods.

OAK

On 01/08/2013 07:00 PM, 
open-ils-documentation-request at list.georgialibraries.org wrote:

Hellow everybody,
I want contribute to the Evergreen development, translating the
software intefaces (OPAC and Staff screens) into Spanish (Mexico), as
well as the related documentation. How do I proceed? Actually I teach
computer programming at the Instituto Politecnico Nacional (IPN), and
have 20+ years of experience with academic libraries in Mexico.
Thank you,
Heberto Reynel
hreynel at ipn.mx

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