Hi folks. We’ve decided to move our translation process for the website to Crowdin. We’ve been using Translatewiki for this, but we think Crowdin is a better fit for our needs. To start contributing, check out https://crowdin.com/project/inaturalistweb. I’ve already uploaded all of our existing Translatewiki translations there. One major caveat is that many languages need to have their plural strings re-translated. Crowdin is more strict about ensuring that languages with multiple plural forms have all of those forms translated before they get exported. Thus, the files I uploaded from Translatewiki that only had some of the forms translated didn’t get included at all. This includes languages like Russian & Czech, so if you’ve provided translations in the past, please check out Crowdin and see if you can translate some of these plural forms.
The long story is that Translatewiki is great for many reasons, but usability is not one of them. Even we on staff find it so hard to use that we basically don’t use it. This means many small problems with markup never get fixed at the source, and we don’t have much communication with the people actually performing translations so we don’t end up explaining context and usage. We suspect these user interface issues also discourage a lot of potential translators (we know it does for some of our iNaturalist Network partners).
If anyone has any questions, please holler. And to re-iterate our policy from the mobile Crowdin project, if anyone wants to be a proofreader for a particular language, please start by adding some translations, and then request proofreader status (it also helps to include your iNat username) by contacting staff members on Crowdin, here in the Forum, or via help@inat.
And to just repeat what I said when I notified Translatewiki, we are extremely grateful for Translatewiki’s contributions over the years. I’m confident their translations contributed greatly to our growth outside of English-speaking countries, so thanks, Translatewiki.
FYI, I’m hoping to start integrating Crowdin translations for the website next week and we’re still missing a lot of plural forms, particularly for languages that have more than two forms like Russian and Czech. @katya and @petra_cze, since you’ve added translations in the past, would you have any interest in adding a few plural translations?
Also, FWIW, the more direct feedback I’ve been getting on Crowdin has really been motivating me to fix some of our many translation issues with the website (removing unused keys, trying to remove situations where text is untranslatable), so I’m already feeling some benefit.
Also, my apologies to those of you who are dealing with my repeated changes to the gender and vow_or_con keys. Those “inflections” are a crutch at best, and the way we were storing them wasn’t quite working with the way Crowdin wants to output them. I think I’ve got it working now…
I think it’s working now. The important things were for me to wrap keys starting with @ in quotes in the source file and to remove all translations starting with :, so now for the gender inflections, if you want to indicate that a particular key is female, you should use @f instead of :@f. Otherwise Crowdin exports the translation files in ways that either cause crashes or cause these gender declarations to be ignored.
Ok, Crowdin translations are now live! I updated https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/translate, hopefully fixed those inflection issues, and things seem to be working. Thanks for your patience, everyone. I will update more frequently than the stated one month interval this month as we fill some of the gaps left by the move to Crowdin.
Basically yes, though the code suggests it’s a little more complicated in Russian, e.g. the one form seems like it would get used for numbers like 21 and 121. Also, other tends to get applied for fractions.
