Drupal translator feedback requested on two Drupal 8 changes planned

We are planning several changes for Drupal 8 to improve the user experience around translations of the Drupal software (including its modules, themes and distributions). We plan to build in the Localization update module into Drupal 8 core, and we are on track doing some of those steps. We also want to improve the general user experience of some software translation tools we have in Drupal, and your feedback on both counts would be very appreciated.

Help upgrade localize.drupal.org to Drupal 7

Drupal 7 was released 13 months ago, and while Drupalcon sites (like Denver and Munich) are built on Drupal 7, none of the permanent Drupal.org sites are on Drupal 7 yet (or started to being ported to Drupal 7). This is usually due to (a) huge custom built modules or setups used that are hard to migrate (b) ongoing improvements to introduce better user functionality. With localize.drupal.org the situation is a bit more interesting.

New languages, partially parsed releases and looking for help

It has been a while since I've posted an update on localize.drupal.org services for various reasons. I greatly hoped that our Google Summer of Code project for activity tracking announced with big fanfare in May goes through well, but unfortunately my student dropped out from the program lacking time due to family reasons and did not make useful progress to roll out improvements.

Google Summer of Code to invest in improving localize.drupal.org

At the end of March, when the Google Summer of Code 2011 Drupal group was in an idea collection phase, I've posted two suggestions: Expose Drupal translation activity and Gettext API for Drupal contrib and core. The first one involved tapping into the huge hidden activity that happens on localize.drupal.org. To quote from my suggestion:

Amazing growth and several small usability improvements on localize.drupal.org

There has been tremendous growth on localize.drupal.org lately thanks to new teams launching from all over the world. The latest ten teams launched are: Maltese, Uighur, Occitan, Bengali, Malagasy, Scots Gaelic, Sinhala, Tigrinya, Kurdish and Kyrgyz. We are approaching 100 teams fast with 94 translations projects in the system at the moment (including our testing group).

Translation files just said goodbye to Drupal.org git!

At the time of this writing the Drupal.org git migration is still fresh, and I expect project maintainers and especially translation maintainers to possibly wonder about one thing. Sure, CVS ID strings were removed from all files with the git migration, but one more thing happened: all translation files were removed from drupal.org projects. As it was announced in the Drupal.org Maintainers newsletter over two months ago, translations are now to be contributed to localize.drupal.org.

Better translation history handling, more data to mine on localize.drupal.org

One of the goals of localize.drupal.org is to provide a simple UI on top of a complicated process: translation submission and approval. The system handles strings in three states: suggestion (pending approval), translations (which are approved) and declined strings (which were deemed to have bad quality). For the sake of approaching this as simple as possible, the backend focused on the submission and approval details so far, and neglected other transitions. However, in practice many limitations became evident.

Install Drupal 7.0 in your language out of the box!

Drupal 7.0 just hit the streets earlier today. This is the first time many people will face that the localization setup and update process is entirely changed (although it is not just changed for Drupal 7, also for older versions). Now translations are managed on localize.drupal.org, not as drupal.org projects, and localize.drupal.org generates its own translation distribution files for ftp.drupal.org, which are not included with drupal.org project releases (and are not going to be so).

Drupal 7’s multilingual system session for Drupalcon Chicago

We are happy to report that the session I (Gábor Hojtsy) and Amir Helzer submitted for Drupalcon Chicago on Drupal 7's multilingual system is going well with the votes. We'd love to present you all the new stuff that was and is being developed and how the new pieces map together, how does the new Drupal version as well as rethought contributed modules solve multilingual issues.

Translation teams moving to localize.drupal.org, usability updates

We rolled out the entirely end user oriented translation downloads functionality almost three months ago. This time was enough to gather some feedback, look at the new functionality from a more objective standpoint and tweak it to user needs. With localize.drupal.org neatly integrated into drupal.org, it is clear we should put our download functionality first and foremost (as drupal.org projects do).

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