[tor-project] Tor Localization April report

[emma peel]

Fellow translators!

I hope you enjoyed MayDay, and also Ramadan Kareem to our Muslim translators!

Here some information about the l10n efforts in the Tor Project


Tor Browser in Burmese
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This month's more important achievement, as usual with the help of Localization Lab, was to release Tor Browser in Burmese.

We send a big shout out for our contributors that under dire circumstances and risks took the time to translate the browser and are still translating the Manual and other important documents. Keep strong!

We had some problems[1] that were undetected before we published the stable release, so along with the Tor Browser team, we have refined a bit the process, to allow more time between the alpha releases and the stable releases, so the information can get back to the team and be fixed before the definitive stable release.

We have also released Snowflake and its website in Burmese. Check out the beautiful Burmese letters! https://snowflake.torproject.org/?lang=my

Checks and tests
----------------

We love our translators and we are happy to help them learn how to translate software in exchange of their work. But the lack of experience makes some errors happen (well, even experienced translators may overlook errors!)

On the l10n repository I am adding some scripts that check our translations for errors. Tests are run once per day with the gitlabCI infrastructure.
The code lives at https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/l10n/-/tree/main/ and it generates the pages at https://tpo.pages.torproject.net/community/l10n/

I plan to add more tests to find out errors, and hopefully we will be able to catch them before they reach our websites.
Thanks to all translators that reacted to our announcement, it was a very big list and is reducing fast!


Stats
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For our translation efforts to scale, we need better stats, and arthuredelstein (our stats genius) is working on this.
We have new stats for the Community portal: https://torpat.ch/communitytpo-contentspot  and we are working on even more:

https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/l10n/-/issues/40031 is the ticket and we are currently working on the specs.

Please comment on the ticket if you have any ideas!

Documentation
-------------

I am still improving the documentation for translators at:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/l10n/-/wikis/Localization-for-translators and I will move some of the things currently at:
https://wiki.localizationlab.org/index.php/Tor to our wiki, to have a centralized documentation section.

I also plan to update the localization section on the community portal:
https://community.torproject.org/localization/ . I will remove some duplicated sections, and move stuff to the wiki,as it is easier to update and uses less resources (for example, no translation is needed)

Let me know if you have any ideas about this, or information you are missing in the docs.

Proposal: l10n sessions
-----------------------

After a suggestion from Erinm, we want to start hosting localization sessions, maybe once a month.

Do you have any preferred day of the week to do this? Will the third Friday of the month be OK? I plan to host them on our oftc irc channel: #tor-l10n [2]

Regarding timezones, being open minded, I could join them at 10:00am UTC, and the idea is to hang out while translating, comment on strings or new resources, and hopefully help each other while translating. I am scared to commit to more days of the month, but we could also decide to do them every week if my presence is not required.

What do you think?


Plans for May
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Keep working on more gitlabCI checks and the stats.

Put the donation page up for translation.

Have a look to the comments in transifex.

Plant the veggie garden.



Thanks for your attention, and see you around!

emmapeel
Localization Coordinator
Tor Project




[1] The Tor Browser Windows installer has no Burmese language option, although you get Burmese if you select English. More information:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/40286
[2] https://support.torproject.org/get-in-touch/irc-help/ (join channel #tor-l10n instead of #tor)