Had a word with Murray (who had a word with Justin) this morning on my pet project: Qunu’s translations. Here’s an update.
Very much to our own dislike, we had to shelve the 16+ languages that our friendly Qunistas had generously translated for us. We wanted to get Qunu 2 out, but the translation part wasn’t ready, like other bits, including the feedback dialog and the profile editing page.
Previously the translations were done online in a really nifty ajax script that Murray had hacked up, then compiled into an XML file through yet another script, and made available using the old framework. This, however, didn’t work for all browsers, so some just choked on it.
With the new framework we couldn’t (but also didn’t want) to use this method anymore. What’s happening now is that for now the translations will be done on the Wiki, from where we’ll take the strings, run them through a script that then creates individual templates, and output them on the site. That’s nice and clean - fast and anybrowser-friendly.
You may ask what is going to happen with the strings we already have. Well, I for my part will make sure that as many strings as possible are taken over, so they don’t have to be redone. That said, the new site is rather different, so some duplication is unavoidable. I hope our friendly helpers out there don’t mind.
For now the status on translations is still ‘hold’ - I’ll keep you posted once we’ve set up the bits on our side and are ready to roll. In the meantime, our sincere thanks go to all the translators, especially those who had completed their translations on the alpha site, but who weren’t brought live by us. On that note, I’d like all translators to get in touch with me so that I can work with them on the new translation system.
PS: almost forgot. The good news is that the new site has far less strings to translate, so new languages should be coming in fast and furious once we’ve done our bit on the backend.
