08 November 2009, 6:44

Dear David and Iñaki!

 Thank You for your work about Adminlang.

 Csaba

26 June 2009, 22:36

Hi. I'm not sure that's a good idea, mainly because it would add a lot of overhead for the developers in making the original language files. Having them on a different branch would make it much more difficult for us to add and change strings.

What we should do instead, is provide ways for translators to easily find untranslated strings and files. There are commands that can be run at a standard linux prompt to find all the language files, and appropriate use of 'git diff' can find changed strings, but these are more advanced than should be necessary for translators.

To be honest though, if David's tool handles this problem nicely, I'd say just use that . He's already put a good deal of though into how to make translating easier, and more users of his tool will get more eyes on it, and help give more feedback for ways it can be improved.

27 June 2009, 17:40

For those of you that feel comfortable with the command line, the script available at http://mahara.org/artefact/file/download.php?file=4474&view=558 helps identify missing or no longer existing files in your language pack with respect to the English language pack, and much the same with the language strings (but not the help files :-()

It runs both on Linux and MS  Windows (I've tested it on MS Vista). Just make sure you have msysgit (it provides bash, diff, find and all the tools needed) and php installed on MS Windows, and diff + php on Linux (the rest of the tools are part of a standard install).

You'll need to edit the script to point to the relevant directories and set the language pack code.

To run it on Windows, you'll need to run it from a 'git bash' command window, not from a regular DOS command window. And you can use the '-v' option to get more details about changed strings.

Saludos.
Iñaki.

29 June 2009, 3:32

Hello David and all,

I used Adminlang at the beginning, and I believe that it is a useful tool for translating the language files starting from scratch. However, as Nigel has mentioned, what translators want now is to track and record all the subsequent changes in the language files  as quickly as possible.  So maybe git is then  the best solution. 

 I was wondering: how the changes in the language files are being monitored in Moodle? It uses CVS as a version control system, isn´t it?

I will have a look to your script, Iñaki. Thank you.

29 June 2009, 4:33

Well, in Moodle, there is a policy that strings should never be changed. If you need to change the English string eg. $string['foobar], you should define a new one $string['foobar2']. So we don't need to track changes but the missing strings only.

This apparently has a lot of cons like cummulating no-longer-used strings in the language pack that can not be removed because of the backwards compatibility. There is an ongoing discussion how to deal with this in Moodle 2.0. The currently winning approach is a central DB-based string repository with all meta-data included, from where the string files are automatically generated and committed into the source code repository.

29 June 2009, 5:20

05 September 2009, 13:04

Mahara 1.2 is Beta now...

Is there an new information about the language files? I would like to translate 1.2 version to hungarian. Adminlang is a fantastic tool, but it's not ready to 1.2 yet.

Is it possible to integrate the Adminlang tool into Mahara?  (as a standard plugin?)

Thanks: Csaba

09 September 2009, 19:28

Hi,

The langauge files are on the master branch, like the rest of the code for 1.2. So it's possible to translate now. I'm not sure about the adminlang tool, David might have updated it on his master branch too - he will know more 

The way adminlang works, I'm not sure it can become a "plugin", but it can be a standard patch at least. One day we might merge it, but that would rely on it being a worthy feature for the vast majority of users, otherwise it may as well remain a patch for those who need it.