Basque Language Interface option

@mirenbz!

My Basque constituency is asking to set their language in our self-hosted Discourse. However, I do not see Basque in the interface options. Is this work still in progress, or can I install Basque as an option?

Thanks for all this amazing work!

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New languages are added to Discourse once a significant portion of the software (~50%) has been translated. Basque is only 13% translated, which would result in a user interface that is almost entirely in English; therefore, it has not yet been added.

You can help with the translation so that the language can hopefully be added in the future:

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

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I am working on engaging native speakers to contribute to the Crowdin translation strings.

I created a Crowdin account to learn how they would do this, but I don’t see how to connect to the Discourse project for Basque. Do I (we) need an invite? Or do I create my own Basque project and the work magically gets folded into a grand en-eu locale? Please advise.

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Ahh, figured it out.

You start at the Discourse Enterprise page: Crowdin Enterprise , then

  • Choose the language you want to contribute to
  • Click Go to Editor
  • Create your own account for Crowdin for this project
  • Start adding translation strings

Anyone know Basque who wants to join this effort? We could get this done in no time!! :dizzy:

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Glad you found it. The Crowdin interface is sometimes a little confusing.

I think especially at the beginning I would select the release folder and either client.yml or server.yml - probably client first. Otherwise, texts from all the plugins that are included in core show up in your list too.
The texts in the latest folder are those added recently. I think there is a slightly higher risk that they are changed again, which is why I would start with the release folder.

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I just realized there are over 100,000 strings to translate! Maybe THAT’S why this hasn’t been completed yet. (But isn’t it great to have naive people in the world? We are SO hopeful!) :zany_face:

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Re: Crowdsourcing via Crowdin

I see that it would be easier to copy the DeepL translations into each cell, and non-Basque speakers could do this to populate the dataset. Not ideal, but it would be a way to get this locale online faster, and hopefully improve as crowd sourcing fills out better strings.

  • Is this a reasonable approach?
  • Is there a way to automatically populate all the strings this way?

Please advise.

I often use the automated suggestions in Crowdin. In many cases, I directly use the save button behind them, which saves that as the translation.

In other cases, I use them as a base to improve them as needed. Often, one of the words used does not match how the word has been translated before.
Translating a certain feature with a consistent name is quite important.

But using the DeepL translation is often enough, but it should be done by people who can judge if the translation makes sense in that context. Then Discourse could do that automatically and hope people would fix what isn’t translated that well. From my experience, most people don’t; reports about translations that need improvement here in the forum and directly on Crowdin are rare. You often need to know the original English text to notice that the meaning is actually not the same, and it’s rare that people look at both and notice the difference.

I’d say use the suggestions as often as possible and skip the texts where those aren’t helpful or you need more information to decide if they work in that context, so you get many translations as quickly as possible, but don’t add translations that you know need to be edited again. It will be very difficult to find those later.

But I am only someone who translates Discourse, maybe the team has a different opinion on this. I think they have added AI translations for some texts at the beginning of this year - which had a similar quality your approach would have :woman_shrugging:

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