As of this writing, the Gramps Discourse forum has 9 inactive language subcategories in the International area of the forum. They have been created but are locked. Users cannot post topics there.
That’s because we haven’t had a native speaker translate the “About” pinned message that tells users why the section exists and how to use it.
The idea is to invite non-english speakers (and users with problems that difficult to translate to English) to post questions in their native tongue. But it is a bit silly to invite them using English when they don’t speak that language!
We hope to also have a moderator volunteer too. That person doesn’t need to be a Gramps expert. But they must to be willing to help when Google Translate cannot bridge the language gap.
Here are the locked subcategories (and the number of views as of Aug.2024):
The titles of the “(About the _____ category)” topics have been translated and a translation of the following paragraph has been inserted at the top of each.
Please excuse any poorly written sentences in this Google Translation. This <language> section is not open yet. It needs a native speaker volunteer to create (or translate) this introduction. The section will be opened as soon as that is posted. Join us in the Feedback area to help open this part of the community.
The Danish volunteer (Sanne Jakobsen) observes that Google Translate made this into an unreadable paragraph.
Translating the translation from several languages back into English made some things clear… Google Translate doesn’t understand “volunteer” as person. It sees ‘volunteer’ as “to help” instead. Nor does it know how to say: a forum is locked because we cannot even make the “Welcome message” readable.
The first 200 characters of the pinned posting are shown (as a Summary) when browsing Categories in Discourse. This should guide users to solutions where English IS the problem.
The International subcategories are not intended to be translated duplications of the main forum. Instead, it is meant for discussions where English is not suitable or understandable for the user. And for issues directly related to adapting Gramps to a specific language and culture.
Please promote Kaj @kmikkels (founder of the Facebook group “Dansk gramps brugergruppe” and Weblate translator) into a moderator for our Dansk section.
But before expanding our monthly overhead and the regular maintenance tasklist. (I see fairly frequent “Scheduled Maintenance Notification from Discourse” email messages. If we self-host, wouldn’t all those shrouded maintenance be our burden? Or could we upgrade within their servers and still have their experts do the maintenance?)
As to the expense, I strongly suggest that the project contract a MediaWiki specialist to suss out why our wiki fails to upgrade. And to enable the Lua scripting. (Since the lack is preventing the wiki from making certain progress. e.g. having the Icon templates have a complete iconset ; creating wikipedia style templates for the Addons.)
Having a contractor come up with a plan to clean our wiki’s multi-language clutter would be nice too.
Did not find a MantisBT request with a superficial search. Only found this in @gramps-project’s Discussion page on his wiki User account.
Mediawiki request:Lua Script
Hi Sam888, When you have a moment can you consider installing Lua script so we can use the current generation of templates from mediawiki/wikipedia some of the benefits are improved performance and simpler to program the templates. Daleathan (talk) 23:37, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
Ok I’d like this installed also please. Attempted to bring a template across from wikipedia and found out LUA was not installed here. –Gioto (talk) 22:45, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
Wouldn’t a full implementation of Lua script interpreter require a huge commitment to adding Security, monitoring for malware and server overloads? Since it is user programming, it would probably also need a testbed site to minimize the risk of crashing the public site. There DOES seem to be a safer intermediate option where Lua Script can be used like a compiler to generate debugged static templates.
It seems like a more widely leveraged investment would be to add a more modern WYSIWYG page content editor. (Since the javascript-based MediaWiki editor we’re currently using was deprecated in January!) Bamaustin (talk) 23:46, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
I’ll investigate if this is possible on our current hosting plan and if Gramp-project really needs to use LUA. (We are currently using MediaWiki 1.31.3 and that editor was removed in MediaWiki 1.32.x ) Sam888 (talk) 00:35, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
Hi @Sam888 Thanks for the consideration to investigate. @Bamaustin I’ve no opinion about Lua and the commitment required security wise. Not sure how a replacement editor will help in my case as the template I was bringing over works outside of CSS code. Both your efforts are appreciated –Gioto (talk) 03:12, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
Hi Sam888, some the reasons why I want LUA are mentioned on my talk page, thanks anyway –Daleathan (talk) 09:29, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
An “Ability to add multiple groups as moderators for a category” just found in the What’s New option from the Admin sidebar. Perhaps it allows designating at the International level and will inherit to all those subcategories. That way, moderators for other languages can help each other. And will be easier to manage at a single place for all those subcategories.
Since August, 3 of the 9 closed International sections have had volunteers improve the “About” posting so Sam and Nick could open them. The Danish, Finnish and German section are now open.
Of the original 14 languages, only 6 more to go! (Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and Italian.
Here’s the January 2025 Gramps GUI translation status:
Hello,
I’m a Portuguese native, and already Gramps program translator. I can translate posts, but I know nothing about moderating a forum.
Let me know if you’re interested. Thank you!
Portuguese native language support here is particularly important for your community. That is because the wiki does not even have a português Download page or installation instructions. The Gramps application is 90% translated (great job!) but only 2% of the wiki is translated. So those who do not speak English may never get to your Gramps program translations.
Have you noticed that the WordPress-based home page of the Gramps site has NOTHING to suggest Gramps is aware of any language but English? The “Features” tab has a blurb: “Work in Your Native Language Thanks to our great international community, many contributors have helped translating Gramps into numerous languages.” But it is buried at the bottom, in English, has none of the icons usually found to suggest other language support, and has no link to other language content.
The WordPress-based Gramps Download page continues this “language imperialism”. It isn’t until someone browses to a MediaWiki-based page that there is a Languages bar to give hope to a non-english speaker. That is a LOT of browsing through English to find your language.
We want to avoid this problem in the Discourse-powered Gramps Community Support Forum.
Let’s not worry about the moderating tasks. You can decide if you want to volunteer for that after the section is up and running. So you can see how it is being used by others. It might need some things to drive traffic.
The first step is to make the landing page of the forum read like it was written by a Native Speaker, not someone using cut’n’paste from an English-Portuguese dictionary. And to have only native language content on the About the Portuguese category page … that might make them feel like 2nd class members of our community.
Besides these forums, there are a lot of changes coming in the near future and we are going to need more feedback from contributors doing translations. Weblate has made translations easier but also distanced the Gramps core team from the translators. And it hides the exploding size of the glossary. And @Nick has mentioned expanding Weblate to manage the addon-source translations too. (With more than 150 registered addon plugins, @GaryGriffin has a tough job tracking the PO files. Weblate that should improve the number of addons that support other languages.)
You should be aware that a significant change in the 6.0 is to support translated wiki pages when accessing Help links to the wiki. So that feature needs a LOT of testing by expert users running Gramps in non-English GUI. See 0013562: Help does not properly adapt to non-english wiki pages or allow anchors
Yes, yes (sometime after 6.0 releases), and yes (immediately after 6.0 releases)!
One of the big parts of the 6.0 beta cycle is to give translators a little time to translate the new feature strings.
The addons and guides can (should) wait because their updates go out immediately. But updates to translating application strings only go out when a new version of Gramps is released.
Updates to the wiki’s translated Download and Install pages (just those 2 pages) should be the priority after the application. Then the localized Discourse support page.
You should update your graphics, Weblate Portuguese is at 100%, for Gramps, Gramps Web and Glossary.
There are some missing translations for plugins/add-ons, but using GitHub or similar is a PITA for me.
OK, so, plugins, Wiki and Discourse, where do we start? How are these made? .po files, direct editing (how)?
I do have this account here, is it enough?
(@Nick-Hall is Weblate reporting Gramps beta 6.0 string status too?)
As for priorities after the Gramps application’s strings, I’d rate the creating the Portuguese version of the Download page on the wiki as critically important. When Sam (@gramps-project ) rolls over the 5.2 wiki to the 6.0 version, it will duplicate that too. This would support the users waiting to upgrade too.
So completing the Download page in the next 30 days is of critical importance. (Added a useful set of WikiContributor references to your personal “Discussion” page on the wiki.)
And the localized Discourse page is a distant third in importance after that. I will start a Private Message (for you, Sam and me) where we can collaborate on a ‘wikified’ draft that page.
