Internationalization

This page is about internationalization of MetaBrainz projects, which means making the projects support different languages and work as expected in different regions. The main section below is about translation of the projects’ user interface: being able to provide the software itself in different languages. The rest is about more general issues, such as correctly handling data from different languages and different regions.

Translation

This section is intended for translators of projects related to the MetaBrainz community.

Platform

We have a translation platform which you can use with your MusicBrainz account. It is currently hosted by the Weblate team, with a data processing agreement in conformity to the GDPR. Note that the legal terms are generic to all Weblate instances and that “purchase” isn’t available from MetaBrainz Weblate instance.

See the Weblate user docs for a general introduction on how to use the platform.

Projects

Each of the translation projects has an “Info” tab linking to a wiki page that gathers project-specific information for translators and, more generally, about internationalization for that project.

Note: The following official MetaBrainz projects aren’t translatable at the moment: BookBrainz, Cover Art Archive, and ListenBrainz. The archived projects AcousticBrainz and MessyBrainz have never been (and won’t ever be) translatable.

Our platform isn’t limited to official projects maintained by the Foundation, and we also host translations for community projects. If you have a MetaBrainz-related project you want to make translatable, such as a script or extension, get in touch!

Languages

Among all the languages we currently support on Weblate a fair amount are likely to contain only old translations and not have any recent activity, and not all projects are available for all languages yet. You can find out more by clicking on the desired language; projects supporting the language will be listed on the “Projects” tab and activity data on the “Information” tab.

If a language is not available at all or your language is not available for the project you want to translate, just ask for it on the “Internationalization” community forum category.

To help with coordinating translations in the same language, you can use Weblate glossaries and comments, the MetaBrainz community forums (with the appropriate categories and tags), and/or a wiki page (create one if missing):

• Esperanto
• Finnish
• French
• Italian
• Polish
• Spanish

Beyond translation

Forums

Discourse’s user interface is localized.

• The few topics written in a language other than English use tags such as "lang:ab" for now.
  There is a topic about making this practice official.
• Pinned welcome topics are not localized, the same topic is also about localizing welcome topics.
• Categories, tags and some semi-static texts are not localized. The Multilingual Plugin is a potential solution to be investigated.
• Content is not translated. If the above multilingual plugin doesn’t solve it, Translator Plugin could be considered.

Tickets

Jira’s user interface is localized.

Note that the content doesn’t have to be localized since English is the work language for the MetaBrainz team. (Tickets reported in another language would probably be translated in English and replied in both languages.)

Wiki

MediaWiki’s user interface is localized but not the content, which is generally assumed to be in English (with a few exceptions such as language translation project pages).

We gave up using the Content translation tool due to incompatibilities at that time and inability to ensure consistency with other translations unless using Translate extension instead of Transifex or Weblate; See comments to jira:OTHER-350 for details.

Questions or problems

To discuss about:

• Project-specific translation: Use the “translation” forum tag in the category for that project.
• Project-specific internationalization: Use the “internationalization” forum tag in the category for that project.
• General translation/internationalization: Use the “Internationalization” forum category with the appropriate tags.

To report problems:

• Search for tickets with “internationalization” label and create a new ticket if not found.

For more real-time interactive conversation with developers, you’re welcome to ask in the #metabrainz IRC channel.