Join KDE's Amharic translation effort!

A contributor has recently started translating KDE to Amharic.

They are looking for people to help since translating KDE is a lot of work.

Please join the kde-l10n-am mailing list and introduce yourself if you are interested in helping! 

Make sure KDE software is usable in your language, join KDE translations!

Translations are a vital part of software. More technical people often overlook it because they understand English well enough to use the software untranslated, but only 15% of the World understands English, so it's clear we need good translations to make our software more useful to the rest of the world.

Translations are a place that [almost] always needs help, so I would encourage you to me (aacid@kde.org) if you are interested in helping.

Sadly, some of our teams are not very active, so you may find yourself alone, it can be a bit daunting at the beginning, but the rest of us in kde-i18n-doc will help you along the way :)

This is a list of teams sorted by how many translation commits have happened in the last year, more commits doesn't mean better, even teams with lots of commits will probably welcome help, maybe it's not in pure translation but instead in reviewing, you can also check statistics at https://l10n.kde.org/stats/gui/trunk-kf5/team/

More than 250 commits

    Azerbaijani
    Basque
    Brazilian Portuguese
    Catalan
    Estonian
    French
    Interlingua
    Lithuanian
    Dutch
    Portuguese
    Russian
    Slovak
    Slovenian
    Swedish
    Ukrainian

Between 100 and 250 commits

    German
    Greek
    Italian
    Norwegian Nynorsk
    Spanish

Between 50 and 100 commits

    Asturian
    Catalan (Valencian)
    Czech
    Finnish
    Hungarian
    Indonesian
    Korean
    Norwegian Bokmal
    Polish
    Vietnamese
    Chinese Traditional

Between 10 and 50 commits

    British English
    Danish
    Galician
    Hindi
    Icelandic
    Japanese
    Malayalam
    Northern Sami
    Panjabi/Punjabi
    Romanian
    Tajik
    Chinese Simplified

Between 0 and 10 commits

    Albanian
    Belarusian
    Latvian
    Serbian
    Telugu
    Turkish

No commits

    Afrikaans
    Arabic
    Armenian
    Assamese
    Bengali
    Bosnian
    Bulgarian
    Chhattisgarhi
    Crimean Tatar
    Croatian
    Esperanto
    Farsi
    Frisian
    Georgian
    Gujarati
    Hausa
    Hebrew
    Irish Gaelic
    Kannada
    Kashubian
    Kazakh
    Khmer
    Kinyarwanda
    Kurdish
    Lao
    Low Saxon
    Luxembourgish
    Macedonian
    Maithili
    Malay
    Maltese
    Marathi
    Nepali
    Northern Sotho
    Occitan
    Oriya
    Pashto
    Scottish Gaelic
    Sinhala
    Tamil
    Tatar
    Thai
    Tswana
    Upper Sorbian
    Uyghur
    Uzbek
    Venda
    Walloon
    Welsh
    Xhosa

P.S: Please don't mention web base translation workflows as comments to this blog, it's not the place to discuss that.

Join KDE! Translate KDE!

It's that time of year again, KDE is nearing a new release day and it's time for translators to work on the making sure that new software/features are properly translated so that the thousands of KDE users can enjoy it in their native language.

Unfortunately translators come and go and KDE software continues to grow and grow, meaning that sometimes some languages fall below the line of what we consider an acceptable amount of translations for them to be shipped with the KDE releases.

For this 4.8 cycle this is the list of languages that was in 4.7 and if the release was today would not be released: Arabic, Bulgarian, Galician, Hebrew, Irish Gaelic, Indonesian, Japanese, Kannada, Latvian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Punjabi, Uyghur and Walloon

Obviously this does not mean that they will not released with KDE since each translation team has a different work schedule and some of them only work when really close to a release, but if you are a user enjoying KDE on one of the above languages you should think on volunteering to do some work so it stays that way. This is your opportunity to make a difference, write me to aacid@kde.org and join KDE by working on translations!

KDE l10n essential requirements changed

In the past we asked KDE translation teams to translate kdebase at least a 75% if they wanted to be part of a KDE release. With the evolution of KDE towards something less monolithic it made less and less sense to have that requirement, so today, going along with the split of the old kdebase directory of translations to kde-runtime, kde-workspace and kde-baseapps we have changed the requirement to be a 90% of kde-runtime.

It is a increase in percentage, but it is really a decrease of total messages required since previously 75% of kdebase was around 13000 messages and 90% of kde-runtime is around 3000.

You can check the essential requirements for what will be KDE 4.8 at http://l10n.kde.org/stats/gui/trunk-kde4/essential/

Join the KDE translation team

This is a reminder that the various KDE Translation teams are always looking for new contributors, so if you always wanted to contribute to KDE but did not know how to do it, this is your chance, join the KDE Translation team!

This is actually a good moment to join, since the KDE software sources that will end up in 4.6 release are frozen for new messages so no new messages are going to be introduced before the release. A second reason is that the release date is close enough (2 month approx until tagging) so you will see your effort released really soon.

You can have a look at the statistics in the l10n web page, but remember that even if the statistics say a team has 100% of the stuff translated, there is always room for reviewing so your help will for sure still be welcome.

So start your e-mail client and contact me at aacid@kde.org so I can redirect you to the proper people that will help you making KDE rock even more :-)

How to run a Messages.sh file to create your .pot file

Some people regularly ask me how to create the .pot file of their program. They know the Messages.sh file is the key for it but they also realize that doing

cd /path/to/my/project
bash Messages.sh

Does not really work and then they are a bit stalled.

The answer is quite simple, but you need to know it ;-) You have to run the extract-messages.sh script that lives in the l10n-kde4/scripts

That still will fail as the script tries to save the .pot files in a folder called "po", so all in all these are the commands to get the .pot file of your project

cd /path/to/my/project
mkdir po
bash /path/to/l10n-kde4/scripts/extract-messages.sh

And that's it :-)

KDE Translations in danger of being removed for 4.5

If you are a user of KDE in ones of these languages you might want to contact me at aacid@kde.org since the old translators seem to have gone AWOL and if no urgent work is done in the less than three weeks that are left to 4.5 on them they will not be released with KDE 4.5

The endangered languages are:
* ar - Arabic
* csb - Kashubian
* eo - Esperanto (they are not AWOL but still endangered so help is always welcome)
* fy - Frisian
* hi - Hindi
* mai - Maithili
* mk - Macedonian
* si - Sinhala
* tg - Tajik

Join the translation crew

Hi, this is a reminder that the KDE Translation teams are always looking for new contributors, so even if you do not know how code you can help translating the KDE Software to your mother tongue or some other language you are fluent in and make a difference.

This is actually a good moment to join, since the KDE Software Compilation 4.5 sources are frozen for new messages so new messages are going to be introduced before the release and also the release date is close enough (1 month approx until tagging) that you will see your effort be released really soon.

One of the teams specially looking for contributors is the Gujarati team, that met the essential requirements to be shipped with KDE SC for 4.4 but does not to 4.5

And remember, even if the statistics say a team has 100% of the stuff translated, there is always room for reviewing so your help will still be welcome.

So start your e-mail client and contact me at aacid@kde.org so i can redirect you to the proper people that will help you making KDE rock even more :-)

Calling Frisian KDE users

If you are using KDE in Frisian (fy) take a note that the team is currently having problems to fulfill the essentials to be released with KDE SC 4.4 and you should join them to be able of using KDE in your language. If you want to help mail me at aacid kde org and i'll tell you more details.

Of course this offer is extensive to most if not all KDE translation teams as more helping hands are always welcome. If you are a user that doesn't know how to code help translating and you'll be able to say

Help translating KDE

KDE has a strong translators community being one of the most translated software all around but as all areas of [Free] Software development the more people helping the better, so you should consider going to http://l10n.kde.org/teams-list.php and contact the team of your language. In case the point your team is marked as inactive or the contact for your team does not answer, you should contact the general list for KDE i18n where we'll give you further guidance.

"Why should i translate if i already understand english?" will you ask yourself. There is no definitive answer to that but i can give you two reasons:

• As any contribution to Free Software will make your karma go up and you'll be part of something BIG


• It will help you improve your english and your native language knowledge. That's because most of the times you understand english enough to understand the sentence, but transforming it to correct native language in a semantic and sintatic way is not always simple so you end up improving a lot both your English and your native language skills

As i said all languages need help, but the ones of this list are more in need as their former translators don't seem active anymore: Afrikaans, Albanian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bosnian, Breton, Chinese Hong Kong, Croatian, Dzongkha, Esperanto, Faroese, Igbo, Indonesian, Kabyle, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Kirghiz, Kiswahili, Lao, Latin, Luxembourgish, Malagasy, Maltese, Maori, Mongolian, Nepali, Occitan, Pashto, Persian, Swati, Tamashek, Tatarish, Tibetan, Tigrinya, Urdu, Uzbek Venda, Vietnamese, Welsh, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu

Konqueror 4.0.2 is more translated than firefox :-)

With the imminent release of KDE 4.0.2, Konqueror will not only have a bigger Acid3 score than Firefox, it will also include 50 languages (49 translations + original English) which equals 50 Firefox 2.0.0.12 translations (44 official + 1 beta + 5 language packs) so if you belong to a language that still is not well translated into KDE join the amazing l10n team of KDE and help us surpass Firefox there too ;-)

Translate!

Hello, this is Albert speaking from my new KDE 4 i18n/l10n coordinator position.

If you have always wanted to help KDE and you have knowledge of a language different than english you can do it! Join today your local Translation team and you will improve your english but also your native language skills :-)

Translations for KDE4.0 are closing in about 12 days but there will be a 4.0.1 so don't worry of being late!

And congrats to Portuguese team that has a 100% translation!