Working on translating the site

A topic for people who are working on translating the site into other languages to hang out and ask questions. :)

If you are a skilled speaker of Chinese (simplified or traditional), Korean, Japanese, French or Spanish and interested in helping us to improve our translations, your help is very much welcome! You can join our translation project here: https://poeditor.com/join/project/q6EUGx3wTF

Unfortunately POeditor doesn't have a great system for just chatting, so I thought this would be a good spot. :)

So for the Dutch error messages, I'm running into the problem where 'the' is gendered when translated, and it depends on what the noun is which of the following are used:

de, het, een

It doesn't appear consistent across the board and it can be tricky to figure out the noun in these instances. I think the ideal workaround may be to simply leave out 'the' entirely in the translation? Otherwise it's going to read super awkward when translated with the incorrect articles.

Actually, in looking at a lot of the error messages, I think we could remove "The" from the english version as well. It would make it more grammatically correct in most situations. So that sounds perfect.

Okay, I updated the English version to reflect that decision. It's amazing how the translation process has been steadily improving the original version of the site too.

I also ran into the fact that 'reply' and 'react' can both be the same word in Dutch as 'reactie'. I opted to translate 'reply' as a version of 'answer', and to keep 'react' as 'reaction'.

So reply = antwoord

And react = reactie

Having both the reply and the react be the same word could potentially be confusing, so I feel this is a worthwhile distinction!

AND, 'Delete topic reply?' doesn't translate smoothly into Dutch. 'Verwijder onderwerp antwoord?' doesn't roll off the tongue and is just weirdly phrased, so I simplified it to 'Delete message?' = 'Verwijder bericht?' -- it's not the most accurate one-on-one translation, but it gets the intention across accurately!

The intention/ability to understand what is going to happen is usually more important than "exact" translation, definitely.

I've answered this a couple times for people via messages, so I thought I'd drop here: In languages that have a formal and informal, we are using informal. We are trying to sound friendly and approachable most of the time, as if speaking student to student.

DUTCH IS LIVE! :D :D :D 🎉

I'M SO HAPPY!!

I bet I'll be finding small errors here and there as I wander over the Dutch version, I'll be sure to send you any fixes I stumble on Kim!

I just went through and caught up with all the questions over in poeditor. I'm so grateful for all the help and interest.

Will there be a portuguese version? Because I would volunteer to translate as a brazilian portuguese native speaker.

Potentially! I can only have so many languages open at one time in poeditor, but once another wraps up perhaps I can take it off of poeditor and replace with Portuguese :)

Will there be a Greek version, too? If anyone or someone who is a native Greek speaker who knows what to do.

Right now I don't have specific plans for languages beyond these initial 8, but we could potentially add a Greek version (or Russian, or Basque, or Hindi, or Italian, or any other language) in future. If there appears to be enough interest and people who are able to help with the translation.