SuttaCentral Voice has now the basic structures for internationalization in place. Long before thinking of listening to actual suttas in many languages it would already be possible with no too big effort for the developer to extend the settings for more language interfaces. Users could then navigate Voice in their own language while still listenig to English or German sutta translations.
If you would like to help Voice in gettig even more colorful by translating the Voice interface into your own language please reply to this thread or send me a PM. Your effort will be much appreciated!
Translating the Voice web interface is much much simpler than translating the suttas. There are only about 200 phrases to translate. However, language is important to all of us, so localization matters. Let us know if youād like to help!
No problem
Iāll let you know as soon as possible when Iām ready It will be at the beginning of October, but Iāll do this 100%.
It will be great to contribute somehow to Sutta Central And that is a good start
I know one word in Polish, and this is a most awesome one! I learned it from @Pyjter some years ago. Itās Budzik which means alarm clock and is related to Pali Buddha (the Awakened One) or bodhi (awakening) ā¦ which is what an alarm clock is for!
Thank you so much, Gabriel! When would you be ready? @karl_lew, can you prepare a pt.ts file for Gabriel?
Wow, I am just a bit overwhelmed with all this kindness and willingness to help! A big thank you to you all!!!
Yes, I just randomly selected them. But I wouldnāt say āNoā to a person who would sign up to translate into Icelandicā¦ orā¦ āPenguineseā?
I have to admit, last nightās release of Voice DE made me a bit excited and perhaps a bit too boisterousā¦
Iād like to thank you all so much for volunteering for Voice!
@karl_lew, thanks for writing a Wiki page for the translation!
I would like to add a few thoughts from the translatorās point of view. Some of you may have more experience with translations, others less. Just a few guidelines I think worthwhile to consider:
There are basically two areas of terms: terms visible to the public that constitute actually the āfaceā of Voice; and terms only visible to administrators, for example when they update the server, clear the caches, create VSMs and similar things.
Terms visible to the public:
These terms should be in a nice and naturally sounding language. It is less important to translate them literally but to capture the meaning in a way that sounds natural in the target language, instead of sounding ātranslatedā or having lots of Anglicisms. It would be rather on the side of ādynamic equivalenceā in this article, not so much āformal equivalenceā:
The two have been understood basically, with dynamic equivalence as sense-for-sense translation (translating the meanings of phrases or whole sentences) with readability in mind, and with formal equivalence as word-for-word translation (translating the meanings of words and phrases in a more literal way) keeping literal fidelity.
The āInspire Me!ā button:
This button is what sticks out most prominently when a user opens Voice; it is something like the ānose tipā of Voice. Iād like to ask you to give special care to the translation of this termāit does by no means have to be literal! It should be inviting and encouraging and sound nice in your language.
Some terms are marked āariaā. This means they are terms to be spoken by a screen reader when the user navigates to a certain element on the website (by arrow keys or tab key, for example). The word is not visible, but a screen reader user will hear it. If you would like to get an idea how this feels like, open Voice in Chrome and install the extension ChromVox in your browser. In order to properly use it you have to define a āChromeVox keyā (find instructions in the ChromeVox settings). Then you can navigate the site with the tab key (gross steps) or the ChromeVox key plus arrow keys (smaller steps).
The dedication, To the dark bound for light
This term is a sutta quote, and it appears in three suttas. In case there exists already a translation of these suttas or one of them into your language, it would be good to use the same wording as in that translation. This term will be linked to the respective suttas then, and they are returned when it is entered into the search field. (At the moment this isnāt yet relevant for your language as long as Voice does not yet support translations into your language; but that may change in the future.)
Note that there are two slightly different versions of this term in the translation file: one is visible to the sighted user, one is read out by screen readers.
Terms visible to administrators:
These are mostly technical terms, and what is important is that they are clear to people working in the field. They can contain Anglicisms if this is what is understood in your language.
Some things should best follow conventions, like the way time and date are represented: h, m, s, or min, sec, etc. These things are different from one language to the other. The same holds for typography: There are also language specific ways of typing quotation marks, exclamation marks, etc.
Just typing on the run (so to speak, and further should confess I havenāt fully read your post above); but while Iām extremely reluctant to mention it (finding it a charming way to honour what gave the initiating thrust to build Voice in the first place); from an accessibility point of view, Iād advocate just removing the dedication completely: itās initial addition was functional, and that function has long since been superseded by the āinspire meā button.
To illustrate the difficulty of translating this particular English phrase, you should know that we spent many days on this and tried many variants. We even asked others what would work for them. Here is one suggestion that didnāt quite work.
The most terrifying thing for the visually impaired isā¦darkness.
Hence the quote. It is a true dedication and should be translated as such.
If the placement is obnoxious, we can mitigate that by rearrangement or other subtle means perhaps? In a book, one typically sees dedications first yet not thereafter.