MusicBrainz Server/Internationalization: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 11:26, 27 June 2023

Getting started

If you want to help translate, go to the Transifex page and create an account. If there is already a team for your language, you can join it, if not, you can ask for the creation of a new team.

There used to be an i18n mailing list, but it is discontinued and has been replaced by new forums (using categories and tags).

Questions or problems

If you have any questions or you're having any problems, you're welcome to ask in the #metabrainz IRC channel.

If you find a bug in the server, you can enter an issue in our bug tracker.

Translation components

The following components are available for translation:

Attributes

It contains the names and the descriptions of MusicBrainz entity attributes such as artist’s type and so on.

It is also used by MusicBrainz Picard.

Countries

It contains the names of release countries.

It is also used by MusicBrainz Picard.

Note that country names should be the same as area aliases; See jira:MBS-13140 for follow-up.

Only the documentation Release/Country is not localized for now; See jira:MBS-13109 for follow-up.

Instrument Descriptions

It contains only the descriptions of instruments.

Instruments

It contains only the names of instruments.

Note that instrument names should be the same as instrument aliases; See jira:MBS-13141 for follow-up.

Languages

It contains the names of languages that can be set for [[Release#Language|release]’s tracklist and [[Work|work]’s lyrics.

Relationship Types

It contains the names, descriptions, and (forward/long/reverse) link phrases of relationship types as well as the names and descriptions of relationship attributes. See also Relationships.

Scripts

It contains the names of scripts that can be set for [[Release#Script|release]’s tracklist.

Note: Because of transliteration a language is not necessarily paired with its usual script/writing system.

Server

It contains the messages shown to users and admins by the MusicBrainz website.

Statistics

It contains the events in MusicBrainz timeline and the messages for Database Statistics section of the website UI.

Viewing the translations

Some of the more complete translations (generally those over 50% translated) are available on the beta server at https://beta.musicbrainz.org/. The translations do not update automatically (see development beta cycle), but the beta server uses the same database as the main server. If you want to use the beta server all of the time for your editing, click the "Use beta site" link in the footer of https://musicbrainz.org/.

Variables

Translatable messages not only contain plain text or HTML markup, they can also contain replaceable variables. For example:

In {entity1} has a BookBrainz page at {entity0}, which is a URL-Work relationship link phrase, there are two entity variables whose name should not be translated, since variable {entity1} will be replaced by a work title and {entity0} by a URL.
In link phrases, variables are often used for (optional) attributes, in order to avoid inflating the number of messages. Below are examples with the “additional” attribute:
- {additional} will be replaced by additional if the “additional” attribute is set, otherwise it will be removed from the text.
- {additional:additionally} will be replaced by additionally if the “additional” attribute is set, otherwise it will be removed from the text.
- {additional:an|a} will be replaced by an if the “additional” attribute is set, otherwise it will be replaced by a.
- {additional:%|regular} will be replaced by additional if the “additional” attribute is set, otherwise it will be replaced by regular.
- Hence, {additional} can be translated as {additional:aldona} in Esperanto.
Note that {instrument} and {vocals} variables are replaced by the specific instrument/vocals name:
- {instrument:%|instruments} will be replaced by piano (or its translation) if the related instrument is “piano”, otherwise it will be replaced by instruments.

Development

The MusicBrainz Server code is using gettext to provide with automatic internationalization of messages and texts used in the Perl code and templates.

A .pot file is provided with all the strings used in the server. They are in English.

Beyond translation

Current features

Aliases whose list of locales is imported from Unicode CLDR.
- Support to search for entity by name, alias, or both using fuzzy search (the default).
- Aliases are returned (if specifically requested) by MusicBrainz API.
- However aliases are not used for display in the website; See jira:MBS-11965 for follow-up.
Language and script (a.k.a. writing system) of release’s tracklist.
- Relationship type to link releases having translated/transliterated title and tracklist.
  - The ability for editors to add pseudo-releases (to be backed with alternative tracklists) for translating/transliterating any release.
- Support to search for releases by tracklist’s language and script
Language of work’s lyrics.
- Relationship type attribute to link works having translated lyrics.
- Support to search for works by lyrics’ language

Current issues

Most of current issues are tracked through MusicBrainz Server internationalization tickets. Some more long-term goals are not tracked yet.

There are most likely some internationalization issues with fuzzy search in some languages (with agglutinative words or ideographic characters). It mostly requires making proper use of language analysis from Apache Solr.

Future

Overview

One of the goals of MusicBrainz is to store information about music from all over the world, and since that music is written in many languages, support for those languages is essential. In the future, we also want people to be able to use MusicBrainz in any language, not just English, especially since the people who know the most about music in other languages are often native speakers of those languages.

The decision to use Unicode for MusicBrainz was an important first step on the road to internationalization, and it has allowed entry of hundreds of International Artists with works in dozens of languages, but there remains much work to be done. The work of adapting software so that it can be used with different languages or in different regions is called internationalization (abbreviated as I18N), and translating it into each of those languages and regions is called localization (abbreviated as L10N). Both of these are substantial efforts, but the resources needed are different. Internationalization requires specialized understanding of aspects of many languages, but that is often easier to find than the native linguistic ability in non-Western languages needed for localization.

The following is a breakdown of the many issues for i18n and l10n by area. Issues that should have RFEs filed are marked with RFE ME and a note on the priority (low, med, high). Where RFEs have already been filed, they should be linked.

Database

Many of the most crucial issues for i18n are with the database schema, in order to support the additional data needed to properly localize artists, releases, etc. The localization itself is done by moderators, and can even be done to some extent without full i18n support in the database.

Artists sort names

Artists currently get a (main) sort name which must be in Latin script, and translations or transliterations are used for artists with non-Latin names. This could eventually be replaced by the already existing alias sort name feature, which already allows any appropriate script for the alias locale; it might require the introduction of either a generic "Latin script" alias locale or a way to indicate Latin transliterations for non-Latin alias locales.

Web Server

Automatic Transliteration

Automatic transliteration could be done for many languages if no transliterated/translated alias is available. For best results it is necessary to know the language (e.g. cyrillic script is used by several languages; transliteration will be subtly different from Ukrainian or from Azerbaijani - in the case of Chinese, differences between dialects are even more dramatic). For Japanese, where identical kanji can have multiple different readings, the correct transliteration may not be easy to determine at all. In addition, individual artists often may prefer nonstandard transliteration of their names, or may have an "English" name that isn't really a transliteration.

@@ Line 118: / Line 118: @@
 Many of the most crucial issues for i18n are with the database schema, in order to support the additional data needed to properly localize artists, releases, etc.  The localization itself is done by moderators, and can even be done to some extent without full i18n support in the database.
-===== Locales =====
-Just as releases have countries associated with them, artists, aliases, and releases should have locales associated with them; this would be a way of capturing the language (and country & encoding variants) of the names and titles.  The [http://www.openi18n.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=46&page=1 Open I18N guidelines for locale names] should be used where possible: the basic format for standard locales is ''lc''<code><nowiki> '''_''' </nowiki></code>''CC''<code><nowiki> '''.''' </nowiki></code>''CSet'', where ''lc'' is an ISO 639 two letter [[Language Code|LanguageCode]] (three-letter codes may be used if no two-letter code exists), ''CC'' is an ISO 3166 two letter [[Country Code|CountryCode]], and ''CSet'' is an IANA registered preferred MIME encoding name, or if none is preferred, a standard name from [http://www.openi18n.org/docs/html/CodesetAliasTable-V10.html Open I18N Codeset Alias Table].
-Alternately, we could use the convention adopted for CSS (and other XML/HTML/HTTP?) of using hyphen ("-") as the separator for all components, instead of underscore ("_") and period (".").  The disadvantage of that form is that it doesn't allow you to omit leading components.  Extending the Open I18N guidelines, both by allowing any of language/country/encoding to be omitted (if either of the second two components is omitted, their preceding separator would also be omitted) and perhaps to add another variant component, as noted below, adds some functionality that may be very useful.
-In most cases, the language code alone would be used, but there would be uses for country variants, e.g. for the group known ("en" as "Yazoo" but in the U.S. "en_US" as "Yaz").  Although it is not strictly speaking correct, simplified Chinese is often identified as "zh_CN" and traditional Chinese as "zh_TW" (although both are used outside of those regions); see [http:#zh below] for a discussion on Chinese languages and scripts.
-It may be that the best solution is to add more components for scripts and "dialects" (preceded by hyphen "-") so that you could have "zh-hant-guoyu_CN.UTF-8" to indicate a title in Mandarin (guoyu) using traditional (hant) Chinese characters, in the PRC, using UTF-8 encoding.  But this could be overkill.  On the other hand there are many languages which use multiple scripts (typically Latin "Latn", Cyrillic "Cyrl" or Arabic "Arab" - see the [http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tags IANA language tags] for examples like Azerbaijani; there are others, like Moldovan, and many cases where very similar dialects (e.g. Hindi-Urdu, Serbo-Croatian) are divided mostly by use of different scripts.
-Encoding components could be used to identify misencoded alias names, e.g. "zh.BIG5" for a alias with Big5-misencoded Chinese; and could even be used to automatically generate misencoding aliases for artist names in common character encodings.
-It might be desirable to have a fourth variant component (preceded by ":" or another character?) that could be used to identify multiple variants; it could be used to represent misspellings (e.g. "en:TYPO") or performance variants, for association with particular releases (e.g. a release could be marked "en:2" to get the second variant of the artist name, marked with the same locale).  There's a [http://lists.musicbrainz.org/pipermail/musicbrainz-users/2004-November/018909.html discussion] of why this might be desirable on the [[Mailing List|MailingList]].
-Some possible examples for usage:
-* ".UTF-8" (standard alias for any UTF-8 locale in absence of a more specific match; the preferred Artist Name might have this locale implicitly)
-* ".ISO-8859-1" (Latin-1 representation)
-* ".ASCII" (an ASCII representation without accents etc.)
-* "en" (English name, typically for a non-English artist)
-* "en_US" (Preferred name in USA, e.g. "Yaz")
-Users could specify in preferences their preferred locale; it might also be possible to glean something from X-Accept-Languages: and similar headers in HTTP requests.
 ===== Artists sort names =====