WordPress.com Forums » Topic: Overwriting WordPress.com translations with .org ones

lilmaouz on "Overwriting WordPress.com translations with .org ones"

lilmaouz — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 05:11:35 +0000

Hi,
To me, it's just insane. I don't see any good reason to destroy all our efforts.

irdb on "Overwriting WordPress.com translations with .org ones"

irdb — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 18:28:06 +0000

Hi,
In my opinion—that is just about Persian translations—it will be good to import new translations regularly from .org community, but just for adding new ones, I strongly oppose overwriting all current translation because 1-I once—long time ago—imported all .org translations and improved and changed many of them. 2- In some cases .org community is using other translations for certain words. For example they used "جفنگ" instead "هرزنامه" for "spam". Overwriting part of translations will result in losing homogeneity in translations of these words.

And just a question: Why don't .org community use our translations instead? (It makes more sense to me as .com's strings are a superset of .org ones)

jenia on "Overwriting WordPress.com translations with .org ones"

jenia — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 14:26:32 +0000

Hi Zé! The validators for the PT locale on WordPress.com are americodias and wpportugal. Are you in touch with them (wpportugal seems to be like an account for dotorg validators)?

To answer your specific question about Portuguese, importing dotorg translations is done (or not) given the translation community context for each language. I can either put you in touch with the two users above via this thread), or if you have access to the wpportugal account and believe the WordPress.com will overall benefit from the import going forward, I'd say go for it.

As for the general question about automated imports and shared translations across different projects in the GlotPress ecosystem, there is a community aspect (e.g. some translation communities evolved differently for dotcom and dotorg and explicitly don't want to share translations) that makes it less than straight-forward. On the other hand, there are potential effeciencies that could be realized through such sharing.

vanillalounge on "Overwriting WordPress.com translations with .org ones"

vanillalounge — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 13:10:41 +0000

@justjennifer, yes, there are indeed two. This is possibly correct, seen that WordPress.com is somewhat separate from .org, as is Blog.com and other WordPress-based platforms. The communities for a locale typically do not deal each individual platform, it's up to them to decide what to do.

However, and given that .com is not totally separate but only "somewhat separate", merging is what I'm suggesting, as in "don't-just-use-core-use-the-whole-thing-including-translations". We also need to keep in mind that WordPress.com's strings are a superset of .org ones (think themes, custom plugins, widgets, et al).

justjennifer on "Overwriting WordPress.com translations with .org ones"

justjennifer — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 13:03:15 +0000

Hi Ze- Do I understand correctly that there are two translation systems in place, one for org and one for com, basically doubling the effort? Perhaps there is a way to merge them?

vanillalounge on "Overwriting WordPress.com translations with .org ones"

vanillalounge — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 12:30:00 +0000

So, 3.5 is now out and as far as pt_PT is concerned there were some significant changes in the way some expressions are translated.

It is important to realize that they were discussed and agreed upon publicly, by the official (.org) Portuguese community. I am also aware of the fact that most WordPress.com users do not follow what goes on there.

Here's my question:

Does an official position exist as to overwriting WordPress.com's translations for a locale, with the ones from WordPress.org?

From our point of view, it does, for these reasons:

Everything is discussed and agreed upon
We have all the mechanisms in place to guarantee coherence and consistency (unlike .com, where no real connection between a locale's users exists

The cons for overwriting are, aside from the ones already mentioned:

Many new and changed strings all of a sudden!

We're only overwriting a part of WordPress.com (i.e. core, admin, network, admin and the default themes)
Who do users turn to when they are surprised by the change? If to us, what do we tell them? WordPress.com isn't "ours" to comment on...

In a perfect world, Automattic would do this automatically (importing and overwriting translations), much in the same way it does for the core code. After all, translations are part of the open-source package.

I'd like at the very least to start a discussion on this.