Weblate: Visual string context/Celebrity strings
The problem:
When the translator gets the strings for translation they all appear as a list.
Although there's a reference to the source code it's not always helpful.
Suggested solution:
Adding a screenshot library that allows the user (or developer) to tag the strings to the screenshot, this way the user can use the screenshot to translate strings or the list and when there's a difficulty the translator can simply look at the screenshot with the tag and see the original context.
Another advantage is that one can tag the same string in different places (same way as you tag people in Facebook), this way the context is handled correctly in all cases.
Kind regards,
Yaron Shahrabani.
yarons
All 26 comments
The idea sounds nice, though I'm not sure how much people will put effort into adding screenshots:
- developers tend to be too lazy for this
- not sure if translators will be doing this - it is much extra work
- screenshots will get outdated over time
nijel
on 12 Apr 2013
Depends, for large operating systems (Such as Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.) it wouldn't take long.
There should also be a toggle to specify a non-relevant screenshot (if the app was updated for example, this way you won't have to change all the screenshots with every update).
I think it will encourage people to translate because they have more control over what is the outcome without compiling on their own or manually changing MO files.
yarons
on 15 Apr 2013
I need to think more whether such feature is worth implementation and increased storage requirements. I see benefits it could bring, on the other side I also see lot of related problems.
nijel
on 23 Apr 2013
No problem, I already told my idea to both MediaWiki and Transifex, it should be implemented somewhere anytime soon ☺
Thanks!
yarons
on 23 Apr 2013
I would like to vote for this feature. I wished for this countless times. If only we can show translator the context somehow! Our translations have 20% of errors because translators do not know the context of message.
It makes us email screenshots with references to translations and whole process becomes incredibly messy.
We also thought maybe at least there can be a URL link field where we could add link to screenshot hosted separately. Anything at all to provide a context would be a huge help.
romanr
on 21 Jul 2013
I would like to support Weblate. Posted this feature on funding website https://www.catincan.com/proposal/weblate/visual-string-context. I think @nijel should review and set the price for implementation.
romanr
on 22 Jul 2013
I'm affraid that I can not change feature you've posted on catincan - this way it means that you will be implementing it for $20 :-).
Also this really depends on better tracking of source strings, which is needed for other issues like #241 or #123 and is already on catincan:
https://www.catincan.com/proposal/weblate/weblate-source-strings-tracking
nijel
on 22 Jul 2013
@romanr: please contact me, we can push this feature forward in several different ways. sh[dot]yaron[at]gm…[dot]com
Hopefully no spambots ☺
yarons
on 22 Jul 2013
Sorry for closing this issue, my bad.
yarons
on 22 Jul 2013
Perhaps Weblate instead should be able to display more types of unit contexts/comments? For example, when it sees specially formatted string in "comment" field instead of displaying just plain text it could render an image or an <audio> tag or <video> or something else.
xyzz
on 23 Oct 2013
Yes, that would be an option as well. Do you know if there is some tool using this so that we can use compatible syntax?
nijel
on 24 Oct 2013
No, I do not. For some reason though I don't think there is any so you'll have to develop some syntax. A side note: having customizable "context types" (just like it's possible to customize checks) would be pretty cool.
xyzz
on 24 Oct 2013
There actually seems to be such format existing and even tool for generating it from bunch of screenshots:
https://github.com/gkovacs/textmatch
The problem with it is that gettext does not understand it and breaks it on msgmerge, so usability of that is rather low.
nijel
on 24 Oct 2013
That's an awesome tool!
Geza is the programmer behind Unetbootin, I've talked to him in the past, do you think there could be a collaboration between Weblate and TextMatch?
Do you need anything from Geza?
yarons
on 28 Oct 2013
I first need to find time to look more deeply into it :-).
Anyway integrating Java code might be challenging and it might be better to rewrite it into Python for our needs...
nijel
on 29 Oct 2013
Sorry for the dupe. This would be nice. Amateur translators need help. Being able to upload screenshots would make things much easier.
algazarra
on 1 Apr 2015
I see the use case here and it's indeed interesting, but somehow there are always things I see even more important. I'll see if I can do something about this during upcoming SUSE HackWeek, but I can't promise anything.
nijel
on 1 Apr 2015
This is highly important for us as we want to improve the context of the translations. My suggestion is that the project admin has the possibility to add a field to every string, where you can add the URL of an image. This way you wouldn't have storage issues.
marcodinissantos
on 7 Apr 2016
Unless you put it as a comment it could be very problematic, I thought about adding this as a unit testing feature.
yarons
on 7 Apr 2016
Big :+1: on adding more translator context, where comments (with drag & drop screenshots à la Github) probably are able to help translators most.
Outdated comments (and so it's screenshots) could be detected based on the "date last changed" of the translation key. We don't think they change that often though, at least for our project.
rvanlaak
on 10 Apr 2016
I hope this will not block the 2.9 release - much anticipated features in there :)
ta
on 31 Oct 2016
It's blocked rather by myself not feeling well than anything else :-). Anyway this feature will be in 2.9 and it will be released this week.
nijel
on 1 Nov 2016
Will this be supported in the hosted version?
(I was thinking about providing links to screenshots or even more instruction by upstream source comments.)
dg0yt
on 3 Nov 2016
Yes, it will be (later today). Screenshots can be uploaded only by projects admins.
nijel
on 3 Nov 2016
I just saw this feature active in Crowdin when translating Xabber.
yarons
on 3 Nov 2016
Weblate can now also automatically recognize source strings in uploaded images (see #1356 and #1366).
nijel
on 16 Feb 2017
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Most helpful comment
Weblate can now also automatically recognize source strings in uploaded images (see #1356 and #1366).