Translation Guidelines

Specific Nightingale advise coming soon…

Meanwhile feel free to check out generic advise freely available online, for example Canonical's Launchpad Help, a summary of the main points are presented below:

Below are listed some commonsense rules to follow during the translation work in order to improve the translation quality:

• When you have translated a string, read it again and see if there are any error or the translations sound right in your language.
• If the translated string does not make sense for you (or your mother/father), definitely it is wrong and you should redo/rephrase it.
• If it feasible, always ask another member to review your translations.
• Translations consistency is an important aspect of translation quality. You can check the translation of a word / phrase in multiple free software project using the Open Tran website
• You can double-check a string using Mozilla locale database with this online tool: http://transvision.mozfr.org
• Use “…” character for ellipsis instead of ”…” (3 dots)
• You can also check the matching locale topic on the forum

This section contains general information about strings that should not be translated and how to identify them.

Whilst translating Nightingale you may come across placeholders such as %S or %1. You may also see more complex variations, such as &(variablename). Copy these variables and placeholders exactly as you see, placing them in the exact order in whichever part of the string makes most sense in the target language. If you're in doubt, ask another translator for advice.

Examples:

Would you like &brandShortName; to scan your new watch folder: (%1$S)?

In some languages translators agreed to specific guidelines. Please check the languages thread in this subforum for those guidelines.