Book of Vaadin translated to your native language?

For a while we have been toying with the idea of having
Book of Vaadin
translated to multiple languages. This would lower the barrier for starting to learn Vaadin for people who prefer reading in some other language than English.

Translating a book is a huge effort and we can not do it by ourselves. Would you like to help?

Would you be interested in translating parts of the book to your native language to help your fellow developers in learning Vaadin? You are free to choose to translate just a few paragraphs or multiple chapters. Whenever you want to. For exchange we could only offer to include your name in credits in the translated book, but the real reward would be to help people in learning.

The platform we have taken a quick look at is
http://getlocalization.com
and we have almost working prototype for the translation pipeline done. Building continuous integration services for it would take a bit of time, but if people are interested in joining the effort it would be worthwhile. I hope.

If you are interested in translating, that would be your preferred language?

Great idea !

I can help translating the book to French during my free time. If my company chooses Vaadin as our product framework, we shall be able to manage a Japanese version too (there were talk about translating internally already…)

I could manage the german version

I could also assist with the german version.

Good idea,

I can manage translation in french too !

Amazing - thanks for the fast support for the idea!

Je peux participer à la traduction et réviser des portions de texte en français.

I could manage the Spanish version

Marko Grönroos started building the actual translation pipeline and Teemu Pöntelin will create automatic publication of the book versions to
https://vaadin.com/book/
. We hope to have an early pipeline working shortly.

Marko, please keep us posted on the progress…

I can help translating the book to Dutch (Nederlands) during my free time

Just an update, I haven’t been able to find time to build the translation pipeline quite yet. This is also good as I have done some reorganization of the book lately (such as division into two parts) and it is best to do those before starting any translations. There’s also all kinds of obsolete stuff that needs to be cleaned out, for example regarding installation packaging, which changed with Vaadin 6.7 (no Zip package anymore). SQLContainer is no longer an add-on, etc…

So, I hope to get the translation pipeline working some time this month, but it really depends on how much clean-up I need to do before releasing it.

Hello !
How is manage this project ?
Is there a plateform where we translate the documentation ?
I’m Interested by translation in French.

The major revisions to the book are now mostly done for Vaadin 6, so now would be a good time to look into the book translations again.

I’ve been experimenting with the
GetLocalization
community translation platform. It has some nice features such as translation voting. While it works, there are problems with the process. The biggest problem at the moment is that if a file is partially translated, the missing translations are copied from English. This completely messes the bookkeeping of what is translated and what is not. When these files are uploaded to the service after merging changes, the “translations” are uploaded as well, which messes up the translation memory with those English-English “translations”. I hope they get the problem fixed. I don’t know if there are some other problems, but I’m a bit worried about how well the platform handles fuzzy translations. As far as I know, it simply ignores them, as they are a bit of a gettext speciality.

There are some alternative collaborative web translation platforms as well that could work better.

The simplest way to translate, that works already, is to pull the book from the repository and use some gettext translation tool to do the translations. The translation build is easiest to do in Linux as it requires the gettext and poxml tools. I suppose it is possible to install those in other platforms as well.

For example, if you are using (K)Ubuntu, install the “gettext” and “poxml” packages. Then you should be able to do:

$ git clone -b vaadin-6 http://dev.vaadin.com/git/documentation/book-of-vaadin.git
$ cd book-of-vaadin/build
$ ant localized-docs

This compiles the HTML version of the book for the fi_FI locale, which currently has some translations just for testing purposes. To translate another language, for example French, you’d need to put the translated .po’s to manual/translations/fr_FR/ and then do “ant localized-docs -Dlocale=fr_FR” … or something like that. You may need to hack the build file a bit.

The POT templates that you need to start translating are in manual/translations/pot in the repository. You only need to put the translated .po’s to the fr_FR directory, for the rest, the English version will be copied automatically.

The translation of images is an open issue. Most of the images are SVG/Inkscape files and it’s theoretically possible to extract the strings from them as well, but it could be tricky.

So, my question largely is, do you people want a web-based translation platform or is this method suitable? We can use different solutions for different languages and it probably isn’t too hard to move existing translations to some web platform if necessary.

I would be doing translation during commute from a smartphone so a web based tool chain would be more comfortable for me.

Marko managed to put the infrastructure together - now we are ready to start translations. Please
join the new thread about this for more info
.

i am a senior software architect from china,i like vaadin framework and use it in some projects of mine.
because there are many vaadin developers from china need chinese version ,i think we should add chinese version to the translation project.
i can do some contributions in chinese translation. pls contact me on email: ivaadin@gmail.com or @ivaadin on twitter.