bitcoin.org and weusecoins.com in other languages

[jl2012]

2 weeks gone and no reply from devs. Who is currently holding the bitcoin.org?

[furrycoat]

So chinese dont have google translator? A shame..

[knight22]

I would like to contribute for french translation

[jl2012]

So chinese dont have google translator? A shame..

Google translation may become acceptable 20 years later, but definitely not at this moment.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_5-JtnlhAI9s/SvGOFWxxxFI/AAAAAAAAAIM/X9kv9wtehII/s400/fuck+the+certain+price+of+goods.jpg

[siesatsu]

So chinese dont have google translator? A shame..

Google translation may become acceptable 20 years later, but definitely not at this moment.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_5-JtnlhAI9s/SvGOFWxxxFI/AAAAAAAAAIM/X9kv9wtehII/s400/fuck+the+certain+price+of+goods.jpg

LOL! I laughed

[acoindr]

2 weeks gone and no reply from devs. Who is currently holding the bitcoin.org?

You know you don't need to ask permission. Just make a translated site and promote it. If it's good enough maybe the devs will see it and link to it. Nobody needs to ask anything with Bitcoin. Nobody controls it. Just do what you like and the free market will sort it out. The devs are often too busy for administrative decisions.

[blockgenesis]

Presentation is everything. There is already amazing work done and I believe it would be a shame that bitcoin.org and weusecoins only get a restricted audience. Official Bitcoin client and blockchain.info are now internationalized. I think it's time to do the same with Bitcoin online presentation.

Stefan Thomas is most probably working on things that really requires him. So I suggest that he delegates this part to the Bitcoin community. After all, I'm sure that we have, on this forum, many people speaking many languages that would be willing to participate. That of course, if they agree.

Here is 3 things that probably need consideration :

Social network / news integration (twitter, bitcoinwatch, etc)
Those are all pure english from now. It could be necessary to remove them until localized groups / news websites / blogs emerge.
Or to find appropriate existing replacement, if possible.

StackExchange integration
StackExchange provides many questions / answers, but english only and cannot be translated.
So it would most likely require a static equivalence that could be translated.

Future updates
The way each website is translated should not be too structure dependent, so if we don't find a translator for a specific language in the future, it will still be possible to update the content of the pages for all languages except the few problematic ones.

I would gladly offer myself to make bitcoin.org or weusecoins.com multilanguage and provide french translations myself.

You know you don't need to ask permission. Just make a translated site and promote it. If it's good enough maybe the devs will see it and link to it. Nobody needs to ask anything with Bitcoin. Nobody controls it. Just do what you like and the free market will sort it out. The devs are often too busy for administrative decisions.

This is fragmentation. Not bad in itself, but working in team in such a case always create more powerful results. And since the content is MIT and CC licenced, it does not represent a single point of failure, even if it does a bit of centralization.

[pointbiz]

I'm searching for someone to translate bitaddress.org into french. See here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=139612.new

I'm also looking for someone to translate it into Chinese (simple or traditional... you pick).

There is an English JSON at the bottom of this page:
https://www.bitaddress.org/bitaddress.org-v2.3-SHA1-1d067dc4f3103622ca9de332c3c86fc57d76ec83.html?unittests=true

For the person who provides the majority of translations for a respective language your Bitcoin address will be included in the
"footerlabeltranslatedby" variable.

It is preferred if you provide the translations as a pull request on github but it is not required.
https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org

[jl2012]

I'm searching for someone to translate bitaddress.org into french. See here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=139612.new

I'm also looking for someone to translate it into Chinese (simple or traditional... you pick).

There is an English JSON at the bottom of this page:
https://www.bitaddress.org/bitaddress.org-v2.3-SHA1-1d067dc4f3103622ca9de332c3c86fc57d76ec83.html?unittests=true

For the person who provides the majority of translations for a respective language your Bitcoin address will be included in the
"footerlabeltranslatedby" variable.

It is preferred if you provide the translations as a pull request on github but it is not required.
https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org

I can help translating to Chinese (both simple and traditional) but I don't know how to use github

[jonwaller]

Hi. I did the weusecoins.jp site.

I was holding off doing translations in other languages because I can't answer emails in a language I can't speak.

jl2012: If you can translate the site text into Chinese, and get a domain name, I can open-source it on Github and put it online.

Anyone else: If you can translate the site at a native level and get a domain name - I can help you getting the site online.

[jl2012]

Hi. I did the weusecoins.jp site.

I was holding off doing translations in other languages because I can't answer emails in a language I can't speak.

jl2012: If you can translate the site text into Chinese, and get a domain name, I can open-source it on Github and put it online.

Anyone else: If you can translate the site at a native level and get a domain name - I can help you getting the site online.

I don't think having different domain names for different languages is a good idea. There should be one centralized website for different languages

[jonwaller]

I agree. But I think Stefan is super-busy, so it may be more efficient to do things separately.

[pointbiz]

I can help translating to Chinese (both simple and traditional) but I don't know how to use github

Pardon my ignorance regarding Simple vs Traditional Chinese... is one of those forms more widely used? Can most Chinese read both? Ideally to make ongoing translation maintenance easier we would just pick one form... the more well known :-)

Don't worry about github. Just copy the JSON from the text area in the link I provided. Do the translation and send it to me via private message on the forum.

Code:

Please paste it inside a code tag like I'm doing with this sentence :)

[jl2012]

I can help translating to Chinese (both simple and traditional) but I don't know how to use github

Pardon my ignorance regarding Simple vs Traditional Chinese... is one of those forms more widely used? Can most Chinese read both? Ideally to make ongoing translation maintenance easier we would just pick one form... the more well known :-)

Don't worry about github. Just copy the JSON from the text area in the link I provided. Do the translation and send it to me via private message on the forum.

Code:

Please paste it inside a code tag like I'm doing with this sentence :)

This is a very long story.

Q: Is one of those forms more widely used?
A: Simplified

Q: Can most Chinese read both?
A: I think so

However, some traditional Chinese users (mostly in Taiwan and Hong Kong) would feel irritated by simplified Chinese as they see it as a mean of cultural oppression of the Chinese Communist government, and call it "broken Chinese". (Just imagine your government publishes a "Simplified English scheme" and forces everyone in your country write in shorthand).

Anyway, to respect all Chinese speakers, I prefer to offer both versions. That would not be too trouble to maintain both version because there are tools (e.g. M$ Word and many online converters) to convert between them. Actually I will translate it to Traditional and convert it to Simplified with one click. Automatic conversion from Simplified to Traditional may lead to some funny consequences. For example, "dry" and "fxxk" are represented by the same character "干" in Simplified Chinese, where in Traditional Chinese they are "乾" and "幹" respectively. Therefore, don't surprised if you see a menu like this in China:

[blockgenesis]

I don't think having different domain names for different languages is a good idea. There should be one centralized website for different languages

I agree. But I think Stefan is super-busy, so it may be more efficient to do things separately.

I'm working on a suggestion to allow a single multi-language website while not putting more job in the hands of Stefan..

[pointbiz]

jl2012, I'm not interested in machine translation for exactly the reason youve stated. I'm looking for persons fluent in a particular language to translate a technical geek site.

If I trusted Google's machine translation then youd already see more languages available on bitaddress.

[jl2012]

jl2012, I'm not interested in machine translation for exactly the reason youve stated. I'm looking for persons fluent in a particular language to translate a technical geek site.

If I trusted Google's machine translation then youd already see more languages available on bitaddress.

No, that's not worked like you think. There is a simple, deterministic matching scheme to convert Traditional Chinese to Simplified Chinese. Actually they are the same language, just some characters are written differently. They share the same grammar. Therefore, it is not even "translation". It's just "conversion".

[001sonkit]

I am a Hong Kong guy and I might be able to help with translations between English and Chinese since we got both Chinese and English as our official language. So I am able to translate without those hilarious Google fail.

Contact me if you are interested, I translate JSON to context too.

[pointbiz]

jl2012, I'm not interested in machine translation for exactly the reason youve stated. I'm looking for persons fluent in a particular language to translate a technical geek site.

If I trusted Google's machine translation then youd already see more languages available on bitaddress.

No, that's not worked like you think. There is a simple, deterministic matching scheme to convert Traditional Chinese to Simplified Chinese. Actually they are the same language, just some characters are written differently. They share the same grammar. Therefore, it is not even "translation". It's just "conversion".

Ah OK. I had no clue :-)

[blockgenesis]

A multilanguage version of weusecoins.com is online here as a demonstration :
http://174.142.20.145/

The code is published here :
https://github.com/saivann/weusecoins

The README gives a complete list of what needs to be done to translate the website.

French : I provided french language and french weusecoins video also.
Japanese : jonwaller weusecoins.jp version is linked, and with is help, could be integrated.
Chinese : Recent comments on this thread shows we could have help for Chinese language too.

What has been done

Many embed text in images has been replaced by text, to facilitate translation.
PHP integration with BitcoinWatch for the News section.
Top language menu.
Hardcoded urls for Sharethis (to keep previous counter).
Auto-detection of user language based on browser support.
Cleanurls with a simple .htaccess redirect
How-to for translators with guidelines

What I suggest for the future

Stefan Thomas could give me FTP access (no need to give me access to the domain name).
I could take care to welcome future translations.
And I could take care of other periodic updates, such as Bitcoin version and else..

This would allow Stefan to delegate more, while still being in control of weusecoins.
No change in the meaning of texts would be done, unless Stefan want to delegate this part also.

Leave your comments

Please let me know what you think about this work. Is it what we want?

Initially, I would have preferred some JSON also. But the reality is that the HTML structure, the resources, the fonts, the pictures, the dialogs, the css. Every of these categories might need some differences between each language. And I think we need to be prepared so that if one translator is not be available in the future, so we should be able to update other languages without hassle.

So I sticked to plain static and fast HTML. Which is, I believe, easy enough to maintain for this use.