Infrastructure

Received feedback from Evgeny:

Indeed the Czech and Slovak translations don't exist yet, Czech is only nominally initialized.
Those with command of either of the languages are welcome to contribute here: https://www.transifex.com/askbot/askbot/

Evgeny will follow-up with details in this ticket.

No, as I wrote above, the Czech translation does exist and is about 70% complete, but under the "cs_CZ" code (the "cs" code is redundant and should be deleted).

The Slovak project does not exist in Transifex - could it be created?

When translating Askbot, I noticed that a lot of items disappeared from the source strings several days ago (for instance texts for the FAQ page: https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/faq/). Is this by mistake? Can we continue with the translation safely?

Forwarded to Evgeny (AskBot author)

Hello, I will look later today at what might have disappeared. Normally the translation work is not lost as Transifex merges translations without losing strings.

Regarding the Czech translation - please do continue, no worries. Slovak translation is initialized.

Hi, thanks! Now I see all the strings in Transifex, but - sadly - the strings that were missing the last time are now completely untranslated.
For instance, the string of above-mentioned FAQ

#: templates/faq_static.html:6
msgid "What kinds of questions can I ask here?" 
msgstr "" 

Adding Evgeny, AskBot author and maintainer for our instance.
Evgeny, meet Guilhem Moulin, our new sysadmin. ;-)

Evgeny, can you have a look at this ticket?
Thanks a lot!

Stanislav - please do translate at Transifex. Once the site is upgraded all the strings will be imported.

Some of the strings are translated via the Settings Web UI as there are custom phrases - these can be done later, the bulk of translation is in the application code available at Transifex.

OK, fortunately it was possible to restore the deleted strings by using git history (it was this commit that destroyed them), so now I am able to finish the translation soon (however still it's a pity that a lot of translations from other languages was wasted).

Besides of that, is there any progress in cs/sk deployment? I don't want to be impatient, but I didn't expect that it would take at least 3 months... moreover the release of LO 5.3 with the link to Ask in menu is coming and it would be unwise to miss the opportunity to promote new Ask forum together with the new software version.

Stanislav, if you have time could you show me what was lost? AFAIK tx pull and rebuilding of locales does not waste messages, but do overwrite the .po files. I will try to be more careful when merging branches (there are three active branches with very small differences in the messages and templates) - but any info will be helpful.

cs and sk sites are deployed at sub-urls /sk/ and /cs-cz/. Data is shared between these two sites and /eu/ - Basque, so don't be surprised at mixed content.

Please note that after the translations are complete, the main site will be updated and these three "translation" sites will be removed.

Also - please alert translators of other languages that are currently deployed on the production site to update their translations in the Transifex. For example, pt-br, German are now a bit behind.

Currently enabled languages are (copy/paste from the settings file):
('ar', 'Arabic'),
('de', 'German'),
('en', 'English'),
('es', 'Spanish'),
('hr', 'Croatian'),
('it', 'Italian'),
('ja', 'Japanese'),
('ko', 'Korean'),
('tr', 'Turkish'),
('pt-br', 'Portuguese'),
('ro', 'Romanian'),

The lost translations can be seen in the commit referenced above - if you show differences for the file askbot/locale/cs_CZ/LC_MESSAGES/django.po, you will see a lot of strings changed to "" (e.g. "Page not found" and following).

And thanks for the testing version! It is definitely useful for translation - and if I understand it correctly, we shouldn't do anything else there because everything will be removed later.

Would it be possible (maybe later) to change the "/cs-cz" URL to "/cs" only? There is no other variant of "cs" and the long code is redundant here. (Ideally it would be also nice to remove redundant and empty "cs" translation from Transifex and possibly rename "cs-cz" to "cs" there also.)

I would also like to remind that we prefer shared data for "cs" and "sk" in the final version.

Looking forward to final deployment!

Stanislav Horáček wrote:

Would it be possible (maybe later) to change the "/cs-cz" URL to "/cs" only? There is no other variant of "cs" and the long code is redundant here.

I changed the location to "/cs" and added a redirect for "/cs-cz".

I will work on this tomorrow. If you really need common database for the two languages, it may be necessary to make this database separate from other languages and therefore - this site may have to have separate user accounts from the main site. I will confirm this tomorrow.

Yes, the common database is the priority here - it does not make sense to build up knowledge bases in two intelligible languages. Thank you!

It does require some work to specify lists of mutually intelligible languages and put them to use, I will get to it next week.

Any update?

Any news? This is really waiting for Godot:(

Stanislav, I'm hoping to get a work order approved for this as this is a bit more than a smallish hack. I'd like to add proper support for mutually intelligible languages.

To be honest, I don't understand why this is so problematic - basically, if user had an option to choose arbitrary language of his UI (which is quite usual in web apps), it would do the job.

Anyway - if this is too complicated and would mean another months and extra expenses, I would tend to leave out the idea of the interface in two languages and to try to find another solution with the Slovak team.

Can we agree on clear decision here?

Not months, maybe a dozen of hours of work, I think the request is in the process, I've talked to Florian about that. As it stands now - UI language is mapping directly to content language and it's not possible for the UI in one language display, send email alerts and provide search of content in more than one language. It may sound trivial but it's not quite so - the devil is still in the details.

OK, if it is in process and if the solution is not matter of months, it's fine for us to wait. I didn't know about binding between content and UI language, in that case I can image that there is still a lot of work - and I believe that the new feature could be useful also for another languages. Thanks for the info!

Evgeny proposed a feature implementation that I need to get budget
approval for before we can proceed with that. I can not yet say whether
we will get this budget approved or not, as there's a couple of projects
on the list that ask for funding, as you can imagine. ;-)

To maybe proceed independent of that - can a Czech/Slovak instance be
setup and, should the feature get fundet, we can incorporate that later
on, or do we need a decision upfront?

Presumably I lost track about the details here...

I discussed this with Miloš Šrámek from the Slovak team and we agreed that one Askbot in one language is better than nothing or two separated instances - so please set up Askbot in Czech language which will be used also by Slovaks (i.e. ask.libreoffice.org/sk should redirect there, we would also like to add some distinct info that the page is common for both Czechs and Slovaks and why it is not in Slovak yet.) Looking forward to it:)

I discussed this with Miloš Šrámek from the Slovak team and we agreed
that one Askbot in one language is better than nothing or two separated
instances - so please set up Askbot in Czech language which will be used
also by Slovaks (i.e. ask.libreoffice.org/sk should redirect there, we
would also like to add some distinct info that the page is common for
both Czechs and Slovaks and why it is not in Slovak yet.) Looking
forward to it:)

Evgeny, would that work for you?

Czech site is enabled now. Right now google authentication is not working, I will enable it tomorrow.

Thanks! Nice to see the website living:)) The Google authentication seems to work for me now.

However, the used localization is very outdated and thus incomplete. Firstly I thought it was due to older version of Askbot, but other recently added languages (eu, tr) have their localizations complete. Could the up-to-date localization from Transifex replace the currently used?

I've contacted people who preliminary agreed to be moderators and I would like to know how the moderators are set up - should I request it or can I do it myself?

Could anyone help me with the issues mentioned in my previous comment? Having semi-translated interface is not anything we could be proud of:(

Anyway, there is a first question and it is really encouraging to see that this Ask is getting useful!

Could anyone help me with the issues mentioned in my previous comment?
Having semi-translated interface is not anything we could be proud of:(

I asked Evgeny to have a look

Evgeny will have a look around Monday

Evgeny, any update? :)

There was a significant progress - the page is almost completely localized (remaining untranslated strings are annoying a bit, but we can live with them). Many thanks for that!

I would like to ask you for another improvement - could you put a persistent announcement to the page (maybe somewhere to the top)? It should state that the page is for both Czech and Slovak users, because this is not said anywhere. I suggest the text: "Tyto stránky jsou určeny pro pokládání dotazů v češtině a slovenštině, z technických důvodů se však jejich rozhraní zobrazuje pouze v češtině (více informací)" with the part in the parenthesis linking to the About page (https://ask.libreoffice.org/cs-cz/about/).

Thanks in advance!

Glad to hear that things are improving! :-)

Not sure how the announcement thingie works, but I think it is possible.
Guilhem, can you have a look or ask Sophie/Olivier/Cloph for help?

Thanks!

Unfortunately custom header global site header is not localizable yet. I will fix this by tomorrow.

Added the header in Slovak, it can be edited in Nastavení → Statický obsah, adresy URL a uživatelské rozhraní → Vzhled, loga a HTML v části

Thanks a lot!

Stanislav, can this ticket now be closed?

There is only one issue left - I still don't know how to access the settings (e.g. to edit the header - which is really good, thanks!). I suppose that some rights are needed - could I obtain them? And who can manage these rights?

Stanislav Horáček wrote:

There is only one issue left - I still don't know how to access the settings (e.g. to edit the header - which is really good, thanks!). I suppose that some rights are needed - could I obtain them? And who can manage these rights?

You are now moderator, let me know if it's enough for you to edit what you want, cheers - Sophie

Thanks, Sophie, I can moderate users now, but I still don't see any settings related to the website customization. Do I need extra rights for that?

Stanislav Horáček wrote:

Thanks, Sophie, I can moderate users now, but I still don't see any settings related to the website customization. Do I need extra rights for that?

Ok, we made some progress :) I'll grant you admin rights then. Could you remind me your user name, strangely I can't reach your account today with your name.

I'm "strepon" there: https://ask.libreoffice.org/cs-cz/users/9775/strepon/

Thanks, I changed your rights, let me know if it's ok now - Cheers - Sophie

Perfect! I think everything that was needed is set up now - many thanks to all of you who make the Czech/Slovak Ask happen!

This issue can be closed, but I still hope that multilingual user interface will be available sometimes in the future:)