06 March 2026, 16:04

Hi Mahara translators,

With the changes to Launchpad last year, we were looking for a new translation interface and decided to go with Weblate. It comes with a lot of translation conveniences, e.g. failure checks for common issues like duplicate consecutive words, mismatch in punctuation and many more.

At the moment I've only added Catalan, German, and Japanese (and disabled the translation via Launchpad so that we are not getting out of sync) to get a better idea of the process and start a trial with a small number of people to figure the workflow out for translators and what assistance they may need.

If you are interested in having a go at the interface, please let me know.

Thank you

Kristina

11 May 2026, 13:22

Hello Mahara translators,

Thank you for your patience with us working through transitioning to Weblate for Mahara translations. We are now up and running for 'Main' and 26.04, and both branches are available for the following languages:

• Arabic
• Catalan
• Dutch
• French
• German
• Japanese
• Spanish
• te reo Māori

All but Arabic are the most translated languages for Mahara at the moment. If you'd like to translate these or any other language, please let me know so I can add more languages. Arabic is in the list of languages so we can test how a right-to-left language is handled.

In Mahara 26.04 we fully updated the English help text and converted it into regular language strings rather than separate files, which makes them easier to manage as they are regular language strings like any others in Mahara. This process uncovered quite a bit of out-of-date text. We also consolidated description text (shown below a text field) and help text to avoid duplications. The English text has often been shortened a fair amount, and the language simplified to be more plain English.

Weblate comes with a number of useful features:

• Identification of double spaces, mitmatched punctuation and line breaks
• Zen mode for translating that shows a continuous list of strings
• Suggestions / reviews
• Discussion
• Cloning of existing text
• Automatic suggestions from a couple of built-in machine translation tools - to be used with caution as they sometimes display interesting results

If you want to help translate Mahara, you can sign up on Weblate and then let me know so I can add you to the translation team.

Do you want me to schedule a 'Getting to know Weblate' session to explore how to translate Mahara with this new tool?

Thank you

Kristina

11 May 2026, 22:07

Hi Kristina, 

thanks for the information. Are there any updated information about the translation process available?
Can you explain why we get so much new untranslated strings für 26.04? What is good process to translate them easily? 

Here two issues that confuses me:
1. What means automatic translation made by someone else?
2. I went to an untranslated string in 'German'. Clicked on reuse an existing translation from an other string and saved the translation. The system creates an red flag notification on the right side block and after confirming this I get a new notification that translation is saved but an other check failed. (Germnan screenshot attached)

12 May 2026, 16:55

Hi Ralf,

I can record a video on how to get started with the translations if that helps. Or would you prefer a text guide?

There are a lot more strings than previously because we changed the location of the help files. For English, I noticed that many were rather out of date and needed updating quite badly content wise. In the past, you were not alerted to updates from help files as we could not denote them as strings that need updating, and thus I suspect there will be quite a few that are also out of date in the translations.

I've now imported German for 25.04 and will check tomorrow if a few extra suggestions are made for 26.04 / main. Since the English text is very different though, that may not work.

The origin for the automatic translation suggestions are given. Per default, Weblate comes with LibreTranslate and Apertium APy support. Translations from a different branch of the project may also be displayed.

In regards to the alert: As far as I could tell, it was alerting you to the fact that there is 'annotation' and 'Annotation' in English that both have 'Anmerkung' in German. I selected the 'Reset' button and it cleared the alert for me after I came back to the page.

I'll also check if there is a way to search for all strings but the help ones. We are supposed to be able to search using Regex and also search string identifiers, but I haven't been lucky to accomplish that yet and thus may need to help of a developer to make sure that my search string is correct. That way, it should be easier to identify all other strings that don't appear under a help icon.

Thank you

Kristina

13 May 2026, 0:58

Hi Kristina, 
we had a session a few weeks ago. From my side I understand generally how the tool works. I would prefere that you add  a video  or what is the quickest alternative for you to the docs. New translators should get quick wins. 

Ralf

13 May 2026, 14:42

Hi Ralf,

I'll see that I get the video sorted over the next few days. We did some more investigation and it looks like adding the 25.04 translation will help. I did see suggestions from it come up for German. So I'll import the 25.04 ones for the other languages as well.

We also figured out the Regex that can be used to exclude the new help strings if you wanted to focus on the words that immediately appear on the screen:

state:empty key:r"^(?!.*\_help).*"

That's what would go into the search field.

That reduces the number of strings a fair bit.

Cheers

Kristina

18 May 2026, 21:51

Hi everyone,

I made a short video showing important areas for translating Mahara on Weblate.

Thank you

Kristina

18 May 2026, 23:05

Hi Kristina,

the video is very helpfull. Thanks. 

I saw a very helpfull function in your video. 

In case of 'douple spaces' you can use the 'Fix string' and it will correct he problem. Afterwards you have to save the changes with a second click.