Translations

The WordPress user interface can be displayed in many different languages, allowing users to see menu options like “Posts” and “Add New” displayed in their native language. It’s also possible for plugins and themes that extend the functionality of WordPress to provide their own translations, and I’d like to make that option available for users of WordPress for Toastmasters. To do so, I need the help of bilingual Toastmasters.

The software behind this site consists of two plugins, RSVPMaker and RSVPMaker for Toastmasters, which are also available for anyone who wants to run the software on their own website. We can take advantage of some of the translation work that has already been done for RSVPMaker, but I’ve just now made available an upgrade to RSVPMaker for Toastmasters that is coded to allow translation.

You do not necessarily need to be a programmer or web developer to help with this process. Scroll down for more specific instructions. Once you have prepared translation files, you can submit them for inclusion in future updates of RSVPMaker using the form below.

[contact-form-7 id=”563″ title=”Submit Translations”]

How to Create Translations

To assist with translation of the software (also known as localization), you will need to download a specialized piece of software, POEdit. The software simply allows you to fill in equivalent words or phrases in the target language to be substituted for my words and phrases in English. Here is what that looks like for RSVPMaker’s current Spanish translation, which you can see is missing an equivalent word for “Template.”

To kick things off, I’ve created an RSVPMaker for Toastmasters Translations Starter Kit: translation-toastmasters.zip – includes starter po files for Spanish (es-ES), French (fr-FR), German (de-DE), Portugese (pt-PT), and Brazilian Portugese (pt-BR). These files are set up for you to work with but do not have the translations filled in. You can create your own files for other target languages by using the POEdit utility function Files -> New from POT/PO file option and importing rsvptoast.pot (the template file). The software will generate a file named according to language/country code for the locale you have chosen (for example, ru-RU for Russian as spoken in Russia). When you save it, add “rsvptoast-” to the file name, as in rsvptoast-ru_RU.po).

You may want to download the complete plugin source code so you can see where various words and phrases are used in context.

Some menu labels and other variables are inherited from RSVPMaker, so to be really thorough you would want to examine, enhance, and add to the existing library of RSVPMaker translations, some of which are outdated. The existing translations:

rsvpmaker-es_ES.po (Spanish)
rsvpmaker-fr_FR.po (French)
rsvpmaker-nb_NO.po (Norwegian)
rsvpmaker-pl_PL.po (Polish)

To update one of these, download RSVPMaker, go to the translations subdirectory, open the po file, and use the function Catalog -> Update from POT file to pull in any new words or phrases that have been made available for translation since the last update of the plugin, based on rsvpmaker.pot.

Or, to create a new translation, go to File -> New from POT/PO File and pick rsvpmaker.pot