Hi,
how should gender specific words be translated?
For example in vc_vidyo.py: You are now the owner of the room '{room.name}'.
Should the translation use the generic masculinum (Sie sind jetzt der Besitzer des Raumes '{room.name}') or “modern” wording (Sie sind jetzt der/die BesitzerIn des Raumes '{room.name}') or should one try to avoid something like this (Sie besitzen nun den Raum '{room.name}')?
I think the last option is much better as it avoids any gender issue without looking bad.
Otherwise i don’t think the generic masculinum is a bad option either when alternatives don’t sound good.
What I certainly do not want is having things like “Studierende”.
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I agree with @ThiefMaster. There are several reasons to keep it simple and fluent for all users.
The mixed form “der/die Besitzer/in” is not standardised by any means and leads to ambiguties (“BesitzerIn”, “Besitzer/-in”) which makes it difficult to define a uniform method.There are alternatives (“Besitzer*in”).
German is not only spoken in Germany, where some conventions are more widespread than others. But Indico decided to translate only country-neutral (de instead of de/de, de/at, de/ch, …).
No other language (as far as I know) has been translated in Indico with the pretension of gender-neutrality.
Thus, the order of preference to use
- other, reworded neutral forms, if they exist (“Sie besitzen”)
- else the generic male (“Sie sind Besitzer des Raumes” rather than “der Besitzer”)
is also my choice. Sometimes a direct or word-by-word translation is not the optimum, and slightly different wording sounds more common in german. (See “presenter” -> “Vortragender” -> “Sprecher”.)
Eine Liste “Besitzende von Räumen” wäre in der Tat eine absurde Stilblüte. In dem Zusammenhang frage ich mich übrigens, ob nicht “Verwalter” eine bessere Übersetzung wäre. Oder gibt es inzwischen “owner” und “administrator” in der Raumverwaltung?
Regarding dialect-neutrality, please keep in mind that despite the initial decision of using en, fr, de, etc… I don’t think that this will be the strategy in the long term. There are differences that are hard to address even in English (e.g. “favorite” vs. “favourite”).
Rather than working around inevitable differences, I’d focus on making translations that feel natural to people and target the majority of the use cases. If at some point someone needs an en_US, de_AT or pt_PT translation, we can discuss how to keep things updated cross-dialect and how to utilize other people’s work to make that easy.
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It is so far possible to use indico in German?
Hello @ramo,
The short answer is “yes”, but probably not what you want to hear. Can you elaborate a bit, what you want to do? I try to guess some possibilities.
- Install the german translations on your production system, just to see what happens? I do not recommend that. Currently 3396 out of 5182 text elements are untranslated, while 1754 are unreviewed. You would get a 30%/70% de/en mixture of your Indico site.
- See the context of the text elements, to understand their usage and help with translating? Please be our guest; I just noticed that your join request was pending in transifex. It would be great, if you could spend some time on the project. Presently we are still lacking a common base for translation, aka glossary. I recommend to start reading that, and then maybe attack some of the files with many missing translations.
- Test your own contribution in a test development? I recommend you to read these instructions published on this site just a couple of days ago.
Good luck!
As an addition to Dirks notes, the translation of frontend strings is actually quite complete for common use cases. Most of the missing strings are in the backend (quite a lot of them in the fresh room booking module).
One thing to keep in mind is that the content still will be in a single language.
Hello Björn,
What do you mean by this?
Well, the fixed strings from the system/templates can be translated, but the user supplied content (main conference description, user add registration fields etc.) is not yet easily translatable.
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Hi,
bin neu in dem Forum aber schon bei Transifex ein bisschen dabei. Wir (Universität Münster) setzen Indico seit ein paar Monaten recht erfolgreich ein. Allerdings gibt es immer wieder Rückfragen wg. fehlender Übersetzungen. Daher bauen wir gerade einen Gruppe auf, die sich um die Übersetzungen kümmern soll und damit ein bisschen was in die Community zurück gibt.
Gruss
Damian
Hello Damian,
Thanks for the heads-up. Are you in contact with Markus and Dennis?
Danke für die Ankündigung. Stehst Du in Verbindung mit Markus und Dennis?
Hi Dirk,
actually I don’t know 
Are they from Münster University too? Markus Blank-Burian is a member of our team here at the IT division, but he is not directly involved in Indico but in out Openstack project and is in contact with people from CERN. I myself have some CERN background too. I worked in WA98 and ALICE quite some time ago.
Good day everyone,
I am in the middle of implementing Indico at our institute in order to get rid off a vast number of spreadsheets that formed our booking system up till now.
I have joined the team on the transifex website and have applied for the german language group. Does anybody know if I one has to get an “acceptance mail” of some sort?
And while I am here: Do I actually need to be part of the group to pull the de_DE translation or is a general account with transifex enough?
With kind regards from Hannover!
Jan
Hello @Jan_Hoppe,
As far as I know, you do not need to be a member of a translation team to download the current state of a translation.
I approved your requests to join de_DE for both your accounts jan.hoppe and jasho777. It would be nice, if you could subscribe to the CERN eGroup (another word for mailing list) project-indico-i18n-de, https://e-groups.cern.ch/e-groups/Egroup.do?egroupId=10094291. You may need to create a CERN lighweight account for that.
Hi!
I come with a similar request like Jan - we are exploring indico for use in our NGO, but would need a German version. We are happy to contribute to the translation. For now, it would be great to get access to the current state of the German language files to test them in our demo instance, and I tried to register on transifex but somehow do not seem to get anywhere with this. Is there a confirmation by admin needed?
Thanks already for your help!
Cheers,
Jutta
Hello Jutta,
Yes, you are right. The de translations are a long-standing only-second priority problem. And certainly more work could be done. I am glad to see that you both propose it.
As I answered to @Jan_Hoppe, you do not need any specific permissions to extract the de_DE contents from Transifex. (I have no further feedback from him though. His two accounts on Transifex have been aded to the de_DE project.) The recent post on Mongolian translation contains a recipe for a test installation. Together with the Indico installation manual you should succeed to install your own instance.
Assuming that your pseudo on Transifex is “Any One” (Can you change that?), I approved your request to join the de_DE project.
Would you mind to subscribe to the mailing list mentioned above to discuss de-specific details? There are several sites in Germany which already use one version of german translation, which has unfortunately diverged in the past. I expect that this can be settled soon, and it should not prevent you from testing the existing in practice.
I hope to hear from you soon.
Dirk
Thanks for the quick reaction! Yes, sorry, as I did not trust the platform yet I used rather cryptic information 
Thanks for the hint - I will try to integrate the files and we will get back to you. Currently fighting two wars against docker and load balancing at the same time for the installation, so language might have to wait a bit …
Here’s a wheel containing the latest de_DE translation: indico-2.3.5.dev0+202104141118.c7dc2ddc27-py2-none-any.whl (50.9 MB)
BTW, some small issues I noticed in the translation within the first few moments of trying it out:
- “Raum Reservierung” - that needs a dash or the space removed; right now it looks really weird and I don’t think it’s correct.
- some places use formal language (“Sie”/“Ihnen”), other places use informal (“Du”) - personally I prefer the latter but I understand that in some contexts formal is probably preferred. In any case, it should be consistent
- maybe something missing in the glossary? “Es existiert noch kein Anmeldeformular für die Teilnehmer. Teilnehmer werden nun durch ein Registrierungsformular verwaltet.” - two different terms for the registration form used in the same box.
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Thanks, @ThiefMaster!
Registration is glossarised for de_DE (Anmeldung).
I corrected “Raumreservierung” in Transifex. Should I also correct incoherent spelling of “Room Booking” and “Room booking” (capital B) on github?
We had the discussion Sie/Du on the mailing list, and the consensus was to prefer an indirect form (Drücken Sie / drücke hier → Hier drücken ; Sie können das nicht löschen → Kann nicht gelöscht werden.) and, if not avoidable, to use the polite form, which happens to be grammatically similar style (“Bitte bestätigen” / “Bitte bestätigen Sie”).
Some translations certainly need polishing. I just stumbled over “Reservierung hat keine gültigen Vorkommen”. I am not even sure what it means in the original context.
And, caveat to all users/testers, some translations can unfortunately be plain wrong. I just corrected “Der Raum wurde vom Event entfernt.” / “The room has been attached to the event.” (Multiple problems here.)
Hm, I always assumed this is titlecased and thus intended.