Utopian/Davinci Portuguese Translation Team Report - Weeks #1 and #2

Hello all.

It's been almost 15 days since the portuguese team has been created by @davinci.witness!

And because of that, I will start a series of reports about what the team is working on, and what kind of difficulties we are facing.

I have two main objectives on these reports:

• Increase the awareness of the translation contributions, and how are we helping the open-source community;
• Show to others Language Moderators what i am facing and learning during this process.

The Team

The portuguese team was officially formed by @davinci.witness team on 09/02/2018, and is composed by:

@phbr - Language Moderator (Brazilian Portuguese) - AP
@mrprofessor - Translator (Brazilian Portuguese) - AP
@leurop - Translator (Portugal Portuguese) - AP
@martusamak - Translator (Portugal Portuguese) - AP

If you are curious to know why we got selected, check their application post (AP).

What is the team working on

After talking with the team about how is the translation/contribution process, i asked them to check the projects whitelisted by the Utopian/Davinci team, and pick one they thought would be interesting to work on.

Interestingly, @leurop and @mrprofessor picked The Curious Expedition.

Unfortunately, @martusamak still have to choose a project, and start his contributions.

Team Contributions

@mrprofessor

He started right away, posting his first contribution 3 days after the team activation.

On these two weeks, he posted 4 contributions, submitting 5576 words.

Contribution 1
Contribution 2
Contribution 3
Contribution 4

A good thing of working with @mrprofessor is that he is always willing to discuss with me via Discord the best way to translate some strings.

Reviewing his contributions it is clear that he is learning and improving his translations skills.

@leurop

He only sent 2 contributions so far, but is without internet connection for a few days, but will probably restart submitting contributions soon.

Contribution 1
Contribution 2

With only two contributions, is still soon to see how is he improving.

@martusamak

No contributions submitted so far.

Translations related issues

PT-PT and PT-BR

As you might have noticed, the Portuguese team is composed by two Portuguese and two Brazilians.

At first, there isn't much of a problem with this, because both languages are Portuguese, and Brazil exist as it is today because of Portugal.

There is some differences on both Portuguese languages, like most used words, and the most common way to construct a phrase.

Even though this isn't a critical issue, the ideal situation is that we have an PT-BR LM and a PT-PT moderator.

I have been talking with @davinci.witness team about this, and this might happen soon. All we need is to have more applications on both PT-PT and PT-BR

The Curious Case of The Curious Expedition

Translating a computer program is not the same as translating a text, and most of the crowding whitelisted projects are related to coding.

This happens because the strings to be translated sometimes have a variable inserted on it, and changes on them might affect the code.

We found out that The Curious Expedition original strings uses the variables ($he=he|she, $him=him|her, $his=his|her) to refer the gender of a character called by the $name variable.

This approach creates a problem in portuguese, because depending on where these pronouns are used, they may be translated in different ways (i.e. his/her might be translated as dele/dela or seu/sua)

After doing some digging and discussing with @alejohannes about the same issues on the Spanish translations (and getting a confirmation later from the project owners), we found out that we can add new variables if needed.

@lejohannes detailed this and other issues related to The Curious Expedition on this post

Conclusion

This was a first good two weeks, and it is good to be back to the Utopian project.

My first impression is that the @davinci.witness team is doing a great job managing the translations category. And as everything in life, there is always room for improvement, but it is indeed a really good job.

This report is still a work in progress, and i am going to be testing what kind of information is relevant to add here, so feel free to add your suggestions.

And for those that want to join the Utopian project as translators, make sure to write your application post, and join the Davinci Discord. The teams will only grow if there is a good amount of applications.

See you all soon!