-- SebastianKlus - 05 Jun 2008

Question

See TranslationSupport for discussion of infrastructure for localising TWiki into Spanish and other languages. See also SpanishTranslation

Is there a locale Spanish version for Twiki? Has someone translated the core pages into Spanish?

We have just implemented a couple of twikies for two different Spanish speaking communities and if there is not basic information in Spanish we are going to translate it.

If our work is useful to develop a Spanish locale for twiki, that would be great.

Do the developers recommend a way for us to work? We Know English and Spanish, but we don't hace experience translating software. We see that it's quite simple to translate pages, simply editing them. But we start hesitating when it comes to translate text in templates, etc.

Any help contributing in translations will be also appreciated.

• TWiki version:
• Web server:
• Server OS:
• Web browser:
• Client OS: Linux

-- QuimGil - 31 Oct 2002

Answer

I´m also an spanish speaking user of Twiki and I have the same problem, it is also an issue for other languages. Yes you can translate a lot of pages into spanish (or any other language for that matter) but I´m afraid that there are some things that can not be transated but getting into the code. (for example the variables, te cgi names, etc). On the other hand, there is a lot of work involved on it, take for example the Twiki web, there are a lot of man-hours on the einglish version itself and the translation of it should be done with a lot of care. I´m doing some translation whenever I can but it is taking long. If there are more Spanish spoken people, maybe we can make a teamwork and translate Twiki into spanish.

Anybody interested? - ¿Alguien está interesado?

If so, place your twiki username in this page to get involved. - Si es así, pongan su nombre de usuario twiki en esta página para involucrarse.

-- AntonioVega - 07 Nov 2002.

Have a look at Google:Locale+Maketext+TPJ - there is an excellent article about localisation based on the CPAN module, Locale::Maketext, which would be a good framework for producing translated versions of TWiki. Ideally, this module would only be required for non-English installations of TWiki, but I'm not sure if that's possible. This presentation specifically discusses website localisation using Perl.

Of course, it would be best to produce an internationalised version of TWiki using Locale::Maketext, so that it's very easy for people to produce translations into other languages without major code changes. If you use this module for the Spanish translation, you could do the internationalised and localised (Spanish) version at the same time, making it easier to produce, say, a GermanTranslationSettings The work to do the code changes could be shared across different language translation efforts, of course.

There would need to be additional work on producing an i18n framework for templates, but as a first attempt you could just translate the templates without any TWiki code changes.

-- RichardDonkin - 08 Nov 2002

Of course having a perfect translation would be the best, but in the meantime having decent translations of core texts such as the basic instructions, what is a wiki, etc, would help a lot. At the very end most people end up editing those pages even if they are English speakers, to customize teh messages to their organizations.

Antonio, if you want we could coordinate tasks in order to avoid wasting time translating twice the same text. You can see what have we translated until now here: http://sostenibles.net

BTW, where should we go to translate the email message people get when they register?

Thank you.

-- QuimGil - 12 Nov 2002

If you can work together with someone who is able to program in Perl, you can avoid your translated TWiki code diverging from the main code. I would strongly recommend this, otherwise you will have continual problems when upgrading to new versions of TWiki. If you aren't able to do this, I would recommend getting the latest TWikiAlphaRelease as this will minimise the amount of code to be changed when BeijingRelease comes out. Also, if you can avoid translating strings in the TWiki code, and just translate templates or TWiki pages, that would minimise the work to some extent (although it would still be an upgrade issue).

I just had a look at the templates and think that some work there would be desirable to internationalise them - all English strings should be defined in a separate file to simplify translation. As a first attempt, it would be good to extract all the strings into a separate file that translates a given phrase into Spanish - the file could be called espanol.tmpl and consist of a number of lines looking like this: %TMPL:DEF{"goodafternoon"}%buenas tardes%TMPL:END% (my Spanish is not very good!).

Then, the main templates would need to be updated to use wherever 'good afternoon' was used previously. It would also be necessary to create an english.tmpl file for the English phrases (in fact this should probably be done first, so that the english.tmpl can just be translated into Spanish more easily, by someone who is not a TWiki templates expert).

Finally, a new lang.tmpl file could be defined that has one line only, e.g. %TMPL:INCLUDE{"espanol"}% to use the Spanish translations by including the espanol.tmpl phrase translations. This would mean that only one file needs to be edited to use a specific set of translated templates.

Although this is more work than just editing every phrase within existing templates, it will make it easier to update the templates and have the results work in English, Spanish and other languages. See TWikiTemplates for more information.

For the registration email message, see CVSget:templates/registernotify.tmpl - the register.tmpl is the template for the user's home page after registration.

-- RichardDonkin - 12 Nov 2002

Quim, I took a look at your site, and It is pretty much as mine in the intranet. What I did it to edit the default web subdirectory to my needs. Then each new web is created by copying the default subdirectory to the new one and re-editing the pages as necessary. It is far from being a verbatim tranlation. The Twiki web and templates are not translated, much less is the Perl code. (I do program in prolog -a language that it is not a procedural one such as most of the ones available- but Perl is still out of the question for me.)

RichardDonkin Is giving us ideas for our purpose. As this kind of help will be really needed, the first step is that the Spanish speaking people interested in this project should be part of the translation efforts. Think of that, If no one within the Twiki users is really interested in the translation, there is no point in doing it. Somehow the state of Twiki is having is, at least, enough for their purposes.

The invitation of joining the translation group is still open for all of us that consider this effort worth while. The first activity is to form a group, then to figure out an approach , then to organize us into areas of responsibility, etc. we can always change the order of the activities as needed.

Does it holds water?

-- AntonioVega - 14 Nov 2002

You might also like to contact existing Spanish TWiki administrators - I found quite a few through Google:espanol+twiki and Google:español+twiki. Even if they don't have time to help, you could perhaps get their permission to use existing translated TWiki pages that they may have done.

(Hmmm - the second Google there is an example of a bug: Codev.InterwikiInternationalChars - should be logged via BugReports.)

Also, AndreaSterbini is in the CoreTeam for TWiki development and runs an Italian site - you might find useful internationalisation ideas from him, although of course the translations would be different.

-- RichardDonkin - 14 Nov 2002

Hi - it looks like you are making good progress at http://sostenibles.net/ and lawebespiral.org!

I've done quite a lot of work on internationalisation of the core TWiki code, mainly for WikiWords and web names. There's also now a fix for InterwikiPlugin so that Google:español+twiki works in the latest TWikiAlphaRelease. See InternationalisationEnhancements for details - the alpha needs some more testing, but would mean you could use Spanish in WikiWords, and have them work for sorting and searching. There is a test TWiki with this code at http://donkin.org/bin/view/Test/TestTopic5.

-- RichardDonkin - 06 Dec 2002

Just started installing TWiki and I am attempting to translate using the idea proposed by RichardDonkin above, however if anyone else has already done this please let me know.

-- JoelPinckheard - 12 Jun 2003

Hi - you might want to email the above authors since they have translated parts of their site. Also, it would be good to discuss your approach over at Codev.TranslationSupport to maximise the chances of getting your work into the core - there has been some discussion of restructured templates, see the L10N section of InternationalisationEnhancements.

-- RichardDonkin - 12 Jun 2003

En http://www.omerique.net/twiki/bin/view/TWiki/TraduccionTWiki he realizado una traducción al español, que incluye:

• Plantilla /twiki/data/_default que hace que al crear nuevas zonas web aparezcan ya en español
• El skin pattern y el skin clásico, de forma que todos los menús y mensajes de la plataforma aparecen en español.
• Han sido necesarios cambios mínimos en un par de librerías para conseguir la integración con las versión traducida de los nuevos skin.
• Páginas interactivas de la zona TWiki: ChangePassword, ManagingWebs, ResetPassword, TWikiRegistration, etc.

-- RicardoDeLosSantos - 26 Apr 2005