Internationalization
This page is about internationalization of MetaBrainz projects, that is making these usable with different languages and in different regions. The main section below is about translation of its software’s user interface, that is translating messages from software in different languages. The rest is about more general issues such as correctly handling data from different languages and different regions for example.
Translation
This section is intended for translators of projects related to the MetaBrainz community, it isn’t limited to official projects maintained by the Foundation.
Platform
The translation platform is open to registration through 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 Weblate user docs for a general introduction on how to use it for translating.
Projects
Each of translation projects has an “Info” tab linking to a wiki page that gathers project-specific information for translators and more generally about internationalization.
The following official MetaBrainz projects aren’t translatable at the moment: AcousticBrainz, BookBrainz, Cover Art Archive, and ListenBrainz.
Language-specific pages
This wiki is the perfect place to gather information about language-specific translation guidelines, issues, and resources.
Beyond translation
Forums
Discourse’s user interface is localized.
- The few topics writen in a language other than English uses 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.
Discussion
Internationalization community forum category is available for the community to discuss about general internationalization issues. To discuss translating project-specific terms, it is rather recommended to use the translation tag in the community forum category for that project. To discuss a project-specific internationalization matter with non-translators, it is rather recommended to use the internationalization tag in the community forum category for that project.
To search for issues see internationalization-labeled tickets and create a new ticket if not found.
There is also an old Talk:Internationalization attached page taken from the previous version of this wiki page. Further extensive discussion should probably be moved elsewhere (to either community forums or tickets).
For consistency with the WikiName of this page, the U.S. English (en_US) spellings of internationalization and localization have been used throughout, but it is worth noting that British English (en_GB, not en_UK) spells these words with "s" instead of "z": internationalisation and localisation.
