Translation project

Ok so since e-jat, as the Ubuntu-MY president, has been pestering people for the Ubuntu translation project (heh no offense), I clicked on the link provided in his identi.ca post one day. And that brings me to this post's topic.

The translation page.

I've been doing it for a while now, and it's kinda fun(ny) translating English to Malay. I only armed myself with wiki and kamus dewan (go go online dictionary!). One can only wonders how to translate "Headers and Footers" or "Plug and Play" (thanks Eric for the idea haha!). Sometimes I just settle with sentences that can make sense, it doesn't have to be translated literally, or word by word. So far I haven't faced any major difficulties yet, only minor setbacks, like I couldn't find the translation for some very techie word in malay but that's ok. I'll leave it to the reviewers muahahaha!

No seriously, the hardest part would be the ones that involves the shorcuts. That's tough. Apart from it has to be consistent, it also has to make sense too. I think the best way to do it to list down all available shortcuts in one app, assign all those letters and then translate it. But someone has to be in charge of this.

I noticed that I can download the .POT file. It's so much easier to translate using say, Poedit, then using the web based. We're using Poedit for MyMeeting translation by the way - i's kicking ass as of now. But I couldn't find a way to upload back the translation file to Launchpad. Maybe the settings? I didn't have time to investigate further. Web based is fine for me for now.

One thing that I like about Launchpad is it's displaying the context of the strings to be translated. Example, if you were to be given "Page", how would you determine whether it's "Laman" as in the website page or "Muka Surat" as in pages from a book? Come to think of it, we can use laman for both but you get the general idea right?

Ok have to break fast for the last day of Ramadhan now. We're having the usual rendang and ketupat for tomorrow's eid! There's also ketupat palas, which anyone of you doesn't know of, I'll post a pic or two later. I'm in Penang now, and I expect to have lots of laksa. Yum!

P/S: Btw, Header = Pengepala, Footer = Pengaki. I had my laughs, now it's your turn.