Date: 
27 October 2021
 

At the second Dataverse translation event, SSHOC Task 5.2 welcomed not only participants who have already joined the first workshop but also new participants. Most of the attendees have registered an account with the SSHOC Weblate application and created an entry for their language. They have started their translations, also in consultation with the user guide. 

The biggest success was presented by participants from Slovenia, who translated their whole interface between the first and second meeting. 

The group discussed the following relevant findings: 

  • Weblate is received well, as it saves time for translators in their work compared to other solutions
  • One problem identified is context: Sometimes, it is hard to find the context of a term or sentence that needs to be translated as the context could impact the translation. The term needs to be searched in the user interface to see where it appears to finish the translation. Translators can take screenshots of these cases and add them to the source language English so other translators see the screenshot in their languages. 
  • Organisations who hire a professional translator identified the need for a specialist in technical translations. 
  • A potential hurdle for translation work is the number of languages: Some participants have to translate not to one national language, but three. 
  • All translators are encouraged to check if there are already translations that are either identical or very close to their language. In the Weblate settings, prefered translated languages can be chosen that are then displayed with the term or sentence to be translated as a comparison how others did it.
  • A big challenge identified at the second meeting was the translation of not only the user interface but also the alignment with multilingual content (like metadata). This is currently not possible in dataverse and there is no activity to solve this. Dataverse is currently also missing a qualifier to indicate the language of the metadata. SODHA has made a workaround for this. 
  • New versions of Dataverse will be added soon to Weblate. Translations of previous versions can then be imported to and used as the basis of the new translation. 

 

The third meeting will be held on December 7th, 15:00 (CET). Save the Date!