Sophie Gautier: an update about LibreOffice localization

Once in a while, I try to look back to see what the l10n project has achieved in the last months. And it is a lot! When you consider that almost every change in the LibreOffice interface means some work for the localizers, open LibreOffice and have a look, you will see new toolbars, new functionalities with new dialogues, some different labels, so many tiny things which request translator’s work.

And it’s only part of the work, a lot has been achieved also in the help. Old articles removed, texts on features that have never been documented have been added, new features are described. Finally, a fair amount of help pages have been changed or created and it’s much work for the translators. For example, between LibreOffice 5.4 and the next version, this is about 4,000 words that have been added to both UI and Help. This counts only new words, not those who are fuzzy or need correction.

Another part is LibreOffice online. Parts of the strings are already translated, but new words come that are not the easiest to translate because there is no context. For 2018, we are looking into deploying instances for localizers and the community at large to actually test the translation. The good news it that it’s much more light than the local application (2,768 words compared to 98,235 words in the UI).

There’s also a lot of work in Pootle going on with features rolled out and improved for our specific needs and purposes. We’ve learned that we run probably one of the largest installations of it and therefore quite some time is spent on improving it for our requirements. There are many corner cases that need reflecting, and lots of work is done in the background to streamline the process. To explain a bit the changes in the translation system without technical details, we previously used the resource src/res system and migrated to the gettext standard, for a better support of localisation in the product, so it’s an important step for the quality of LibreOffice localisation and a better recognition of our translators. Help is of course always welcome

Being a welcoming and open community requires ongoing work, for example, most of the contributors are not English native speakers while all the work is done in English. It’s true also for the strings added to the product but it’s not a problem because with all the eyes of the l10n community each typo made in the sources is reported, even a double space is reported and corrected. This is an unseen work done by the localisation team on the en_US version and I would like to thank them a lot for that.

And we have welcomed our newest languages: Plautdietsch and Sardinian.

In addition to the IRC channel #libreoffice-nlp on Freenode, we have now three new discussion groups on Telegram: LibreOfficeLocalisation for general discussions and information on localisation, LibreOfficeCJK for Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages and LibreOfficeRTL for languages using complex scripts. Exchanges going on there are mostly about bugs encountered on these writing modes more than on localisation. Most important news and information still go to the mailing lists.

Part of the translation work concerns also not only the product but the marketing activity, be it on the product or on the community. Thus we also work on videos subtitles, press releases, website updates. We also translate the surveys the UX/Design team is running to get feedback on the user preferences/habits.
The community is made of great people helping in all the facets of the project. LibreOffice project is big and it’s difficult to get the whole picture in mind when you’re not here for years and when you concentrate your efforts on a particular area. So part of my role is to help that each project is working well with others. Helping local marketing contributors to adapt the campaigns to their local target, helping UX to integrate localisation at the beginning are some examples.

There is a special thank I wanted to add for Yousuf Philips and the tireless help he brings in solving CJK and RTL bugs and simplifying the UI with a never-ending enthusiasm, big thanks to you Jay!