Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.Problem/Motivation
As a follow-up to #2762261: Figure out process for translating the User Guide, the Hungarian translation team has been using "FreeTM" translation memory (TM) software to help them with their translation process and ensure it is self-consistent.
It would be great if the Hungarian team could write something up for the User Guide Contributor Guidelines book, so that other translation teams could learn about this.
Proposed resolution
- We would add a section to the Project Managers section of the guidelines that would cover:
(a) what is TM
(b) which TM software is recommended
(c) where to get the software
(d) how to set it up
(e) what the benefits are to the translation teamThis section would go just after this one in the contributor guide:
https://www.drupal.org/docs/user_guide_guidelines/pm-guide.html#pm-guide...And its title could be something like:
(Optional) Setting up translation memory software
[Also that page has links at the top for a Table of Contents, so this new section should be included there]
- We would also add a section to the contributor guide for individual translators, which would cover how to use the TM software once it is set up.
To do this:
a) Write up a section called something like:
Detailed instructions: Using translation memory software
and add this to the bottom of the practicalities.txt file.
b) Add a link to this section in the "Complete the translating or reviewing task." step of:
https://www.drupal.org/docs/user_guide_guidelines/practicalities.html#pr...
that says something like:(section link) for information on using a translation memory.
Remaining tasks
The Hungarian team already has some of this information available in Hungarian. So, it mostly needs to be organized, translated into English,and made into a patch.
| Comment | File | Size | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| #13 | 2828137-pm-guide-12-reroll.patch | 9.2 KB | jhodgdon |
Comments
Comment #2
jhodgdonComment #3
baluertlSorry, I'm in a bit rush, but here's a quick draft of the English translation of our FreeTM-guide. Could someone native (or high-level) English speaker review and correct my grammatical and other mistakes, please? Thanks in advance :)
After that we can figure out in detail, how to compose into the Translators' Guide.
Comment #4
jhodgdonHi Balu! I will make a grammatical run-through of this sometime soon, but ... it might not be until next week, as I'm pretty busy the rest of this week and through the weekend. It looks pretty good at first glance!
Comment #5
jhodgdonHere's my first pass at editing this file. I reorganized it a bit... it's not quite ready to go into the Contributor Guide, but I think it is closer, a bit more concise, a bit more clearly organized, and hopefully still accurate. Take a look?
I didn't make an interdiff file because every line of the file had changed (I think).
Comment #6
jhodgdonIt seems like we need to add a section to this issue that tells how to add information to the TM:
- The Drupal Core translations from localize.d.o
- The topic source files from the User guide.
For the User Guide topic source, see also balagan's note about newlines on #2813089-17: Remove newlines from sentences in HU txt files
Comment #7
jhodgdonNeeds work for #6. Also someone needs to review my revision in #5 for accuracy.
Comment #8
jhodgdonComment #9
jhodgdonI think it would be good to work on this again? See patch in #5, plus #6...
Comment #10
baluertlYes, I try to allocate some time to move this issue forward. Now German and Bahasa Indonesia teams starts, so this might be a good time for them to give it a try.
Comment #11
baluertlAs a preparation to our presentation together with Michael Lenahan on Heidelberg Drupal Camp I composed a proposal of this topic based on Jennifer's comments above. I call this behavior of mine "event-driven contribution" :)
Some points to discuss:
As this topic covers a bit wider scope (why does it worth, how to use, etc.) I suggest we can name this topic as "(Optional) Using the aid of translation memory" rather than "(Optional) Setting up translation memory software" as mentioned above.
To help future team managers' decision-making I moved upper point "(e) what the benefits are to the translation team" Jennifer suggested and also reworded its title a bit.
As FreeTM can be used as SaaS, this title ("Where to get the software") is not applicable, so I joined it up to the previous introductionary one.
I inserted here the "Configuring the translation memory software" part of the previously written and reviewed draft from comment #5. (Please check the levels of listings if they were copied correctly and are still properly displayed.) But draft's "Background on translation memory" mostly was some similar introduction, so I interwoven into the current points (a) and (b).
I saw you commented out the images in your review. Is it by the unsure hosting of them or you'd prefer to leave them out from the guide? In my opinion they would help a lot (due to the complex UI of FreeTM) and as they are 8-bit compressed PNGs, so they wouldn't take too much space if we commit them into our repository, would they? In case if you'd refrain from storing them in Git, then we may can consider linking them from Drupal.hu, because except the very last one (not too useful) we can reuse almost all of them for English as well.
Although I plan to test this process first on my own to gain confidence, but I did not have time yet to get through. Until then I can only refer to balagan's post. Hopefully in a Phase 2 I can incorporate his steps into this guide, if you agree.
If you mean the /source/LC/*.txt files, then those are uploaded to FreeTM one-by-one, when user copies the cgit URL during creating a document. Or did I misunderstood your request?
Unfortunately I realised now, after hours, that the blogpost does not cover this mentioned "tikal rules" thing he used to remove the 80-char linebreaks from the source files. As a quick fix on Monday I'll try to do an appointment with him to look over this preparation together.
In section 3.1.5 there's a codeblock suggesting a template for creating the first "setup" issue. It ends with a list of "Optional but recommended steps". So I suggest we can add an extra step to the end of this list pointing to this new 3.1.6 section.
Added myself.
Actually it's a bit unclear for me, because this list of steps was written both team Managers and Translators in mind (the only divergence is at Step 4.), so we may can point here individual translators seeking for assistance.
Comment #12
jhodgdonThis looks pretty good! However, a few points:
a) I made some grammar edits.
b) I also made the text much shorter, by cutting out what I thought was interesting, but kind of redundant or overkill.
c) Also note that the Contributor Guide tries as much as possible to be a generic "Contributing to a project involving writing and editing and translating AsciiDoc documentation within the Drupal project" rather than specific to the User Guide. So, some edits were to make it a bit more generic.
d) Also, except in issue templates, we wrap the Guidelines text at 80-character lines.
e) I see what you mean about combining the translator and project manager steps... but really we need them to be separate, because the translators will not be looking at the project manager guide. So, I think the sections about deciding which TM to use and the benefits belong in the project managers guide, and we should also add a part about setting up the common TM, and importing the Drupal UI translations. Then the other parts that are for translators should be moved to the translation guide. See issue summary... I haven't done this yet.
f) I would prefer having steps included about how to set up the common TM rather than referring to an outside blog.
g) Yes, we should include the images! But they need to be made into AsciiDoc image tags that look like this:
Comment #13
jhodgdonBump! This patch still needs a review. Rerolled patch so it will apply. @Balu Ertl -- any comments on this?
Comment #14
jhodgdon@Balu Ertl -- it looks like we need to add something in here about the Index entries, from #2847633: List of Index entries
The idea is you can run a command at a Linux/Unix/Mac command line, from the top directory of the User Guide project:
Then ... I guess we want to put a step in this patch that says to import index-entries.txt into the translation memory somehow, so that the index entries are translated the same every time? I'm not sure what we should say...
Comment #15
baluertlTo be honest, I have to admit that during those two years I've drifted a bit away from the concept of utilizing TM for translating the User Guide. As you may or may not know, in August 2017 due to an unfortunate miscommunication the HU team lost its precisely built memory database when the entire book was only 75% translated. This set back not only our progress, but also my motivation as well. The remaining quarter of the topics were translated purely in a plain text editor (with lots of search&replacing, of course :)
Therefore we can commit this patch into the PM guide (thanks for rerolling), but personally, I feel a bit unsure whether anyone can support a new translation team leader trying to set up their own brand new TM.
Comment #16
baluertlComment #17
jhodgdonNo, I didn't realize that happened! Well, I'll go ahead and commit this anyway. Thanks!