In January we announced the availability of a language crowdsourcing project, the Blesta Translator. The goal of the project is to facilitate the translation of Blesta into many languages, and to ship these languages with Blesta, starting with version 3.

This week we made a few additional changes live, and they are –

1. Added Nederlands, NL (nl_nl) to the list of available languages
2. Added a machine translation (Google) for reference
3. Added “In Order” and “For Confirmation” translation methods
4. Added some context to language strings including terms, filename, and type

#2 Machine Translation

The machine translation is available for all translation methods, “Random”, “In Order”, and “For Confirmation”. By default it is not displayed, but will be shown when a link is clicked. The idea is that it may be useful to see the Google translation, but that it shouldn’t be relied on, or copied without forethought.

#3 Additional Translation Methods

The goal of the translator isn’t simply to get translations, but to get good translations.

When different people translate a term identically, it has a higher weight than terms that are only translated by one person. Such terms become “confirmed”, and are trusted to be more accurate. So, the “For Confirmation” translation method displays the best possible translations by other people. One of these translations can be accepted by clicking on it. Alternatively a different translation may be entered like normal.

The “In Order” translation method is pretty self-explanatory, terms are given in alphabetical order with the goal of completing a translation. This means that some terms may be skipped initially until the translation is completed as a whole. Once the translation is completed, terms that were intentionally skipped will be presented.

The end goal is to make several translations available. A version translated wholly by a specific person, a confirmed only translation that may be missing some terms (missing terms are shown in the default language), or a complete translation consisting of confirmed only or both confirmed and unconfirmed terms. The latter are the ones we will include with Blesta by default, but all will be available for direct download in the future.

Thanks for reading! If you know another language, please sign-up and contribute

Video next week? Probably.

Blesta is in use in well more than 50 countries, and our friends abroad speak many different and wonderful languages. Blesta has always supported multi-language and some of our users have made their translations available to the community, but it has only ever shipped with English support and translations have been spotty at best. That’s all about to change.

Today we announce the availability of Blesta Translator, a collaborative, community driven effort to provide full, accurate, and up to date translations in as many languages as possible.

The success of this project depends on you. If you are fluent in another language and would like to contribute to the translation of Blesta into your language all you need to do is sign up and start. Contribute as little or as much as you like as often as you like. New and updated language will be added to the translator in advance of software releases and it’s our hope that the new language will be translated in advance of and ship with official releases.

While this is still a beta version, we will be adding a few new features in the coming weeks. Ultimately a daily snapshot of translations will be available for download. We realize this is a continual effort and nobody should have to wait for the next Blesta release to take advantage of the latest translations. Partial translations will fallback to English. Additional stats, graphs, and context for translations will come as well.

So, what are you waiting for? Head on over to translate.blesta.com and get started! You’ll be translating version 3.0.0_dev. While it’s not complete, now’s a good time to get a head start! Contributors are given credit for their efforts.

And, of course, if you have a suggestion to make this tool better please let us know.

Here are the languages currently available for translation:

1. العربية, SA (ar_sa)
2. Deutsch, DE (de_de)
3. Ελληνικά, GR (el_gr)
4. English, UK (en_uk)
5. Español, ES (es_es)
6. français, FR (fr_fr)
7. עברית, IL (he_il)
8. italiano, IT (it_it)
9. 日本語, JP (ja_jp)
10. polski, PL (pl_pl)
11. português, PT (pt_pt)
12. Română, RO (ro_ro)
13. svenska, SE (sv_se)
14. 中文, CN (zh_cn)