Translation of programs into Belarusian for beginners

Hello! Since 2018, I have been engaged in volunteer translations into Belarusian, and in recent years I have been doing commercial orders. Yesterday, I once again reviewed various open projects of translation into Belarusian and realized that it is time to make a thread (or chain?) about how to join the community of Belarusian translation of programs. There is a lot of work, but information is difficult to find.

I decided to post here as well, because Reddit is indexed by search engines and it seems that there are quite a lot of people sitting here.

The first is chats where you can talk with like-minded people and ask questions. There is a choice here, and it is mainly chats in tg: – Telegram translation community into Belarusian @peraklad. He learned a lot there himself. Sometimes it’s toxic, but there are quite a few experienced community members; – A lot of people are sitting in @uchats (but the flood prevails there); – Lynx to Belarusian translation community chat @gnulinuxbechat. There is no flood, you can have a productive conversation; – the Gamer community https://t.me/+FQx_upNA2UMzMzUy. He mostly translates video games, but sometimes you can also discuss something on the topic there. – there are smaller communities for specific projects, as well as private communities closed for security purposes. You can get there through dating.

Before starting the translation, be sure to familiarize yourself with my board, in particular the sheets with the style guide and useful links:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1k3XLX0G50jbHGxWxQge_pVI1U4mzf36IDkUcAUpkIvc/edit?usp=sharing

On Linux, I recommend installing the Eloquent program, and installing LanguageTool on the browser, choosing a local server with a standard address in the settings. Then you can use the best spellchecker for free.

Many novice translators begin to boldly challenge terminology and style guides, but believe me, this is all the result of long-term discussions of various communities, including linguists, as well as the work of specialists with appropriate specialization and education. Therefore, in discussions, you will often hear the argument a la “that’s how they write in Google”. It may seem silly to newbies, but it’s a matter of experience and credit. There are commercial translators who consistently demonstrate quality, professionalism and standards, we strive to meet these standards and make Belarusian interfaces uniform so that the user does not panic. Therefore, in this case it is very important to look at other large projects, dictionaries, corpora and be guided by them. In any case, your questions are welcome, but if you have the impulse to change everything in the world, then I strongly advise you to read at least “Theory and Practice of Belarusian Terminology”, 1999.

Here I draw the attention of supporters of alternative spellings and "derussification" Belarusian language. There are many users who come to teach everyone "real" Belarusian language and start "to correct" already translated lines to what they have in mind. Don’t do that, it’s just vandalism and hurts everyone. If you want to propose something, go to the discussion and calmly prove your position, but also try to listen and understand the arguments of others. If you have your own spelling, collect fans and make a separate project. Movasrachi is our favorite folk entertainment, but it takes a lot of time, nerves and effort. Let’s treat each other with respect. Also, keep in mind that many translators live in Belarus, so avoid discussing politics.

You will most likely work with CAT (Computer-assisted translation) systems. You need to know well that there is a glossary, style guide, translation memory (TM), machine translation (MT), special markup, extensions .po (the most popular format of translation files), .tmx (format for TMac).

Do you understand what is for what? Super! Let’s start translating!

Platforms where you can login and start translating immediately:- https://crowdin.com/projects?q=#showcases — the largest and most active platform for open translations with the most complete functionality and an active Belarusian translation community. It’s a great start, and the overall quality of the translations there is quite high. – https://translations.telegram.org — Telegram translation. A great platform to gain experience, talk to an active community of translators and see real work on a large project. One of the central translation projects for the community. The platform, meanwhile, is quite primitive and inconvenient, unfortunately. – https://translatewiki.net is a huge portal for translating the interface and some common pages of all wiki projects, as well as other non-Wikimedia projects. There is a lot of work and many different practices. – https://hosted.weblate.org/ — some translations hosted on weblate. Not the most convenient platform, but there are quite a lot of interesting projects that are poorly or not at all translated into Belarusian. Some of the projects on Weblate are hosted on project servers, so they have their addresses there.

other projects: A lot of projects need to be searched by going to the official repositories of the programs, to the official websites. Somewhere there will be a project deployed on some CAT site, somewhere you will have to download the files and edit them locally. Sometimes you have to work with git. It’s not terrible, but it will take a little fumbling to figure it out. To translate .po files, I recommend Poedit, which supports TM and LanguageTool. Here are some more important but not so user-friendly projects:- https://pontoon.mozilla.org/ (there are problems with the moderator, but it seems that the situation is improving and it is already possible to fix the artifacts of the old poor-quality translation) – https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-l10n-by
– https://l10n.gnome.org/teams/be/
– https://l10n.elementaryos.org/
– https://translate.fedoraproject.org/languages/be/
– https://translate.wordpress.org/locale/bel/
– https://translations.documentfoundation.org/
There are other big projects, but unfortunately many teams are quite dead and need to be specifically revived or created (such as the KDE translation team).

If you are looking for Tmac files, you can get them here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1h7DDzFLE3pxRxtbRGWLffc_vNy0_VEW5?usp=sharing
I will periodically add something from myself and other translators.

If you find something else, add it here, clarify, or ask questions!