Translation MDN articles to Arabic

MDN
#1

Hello,

I am inquirying about the translation of MDN articles into Arabic, I asked on the Mozillian localication group l10i, they said there is no Admin or a leader team for that purpose.

My concern is about the choice of wording, for example the technical terms could be translated differently by different translator,so how to assure consistentcy across the MDN Arabic articles?

#2

Hi @ghassan.maslamani!

One way to help maintain consistency across translators would be to create a translation glossary page. It would contain a list of English technical terms and their Arabic translations.

Of course, getting translators to know about it and use it is another problem, more social than technical. The doc status overview page for Arabic is a good place to link to a glossary page.

I think the Mozilla French community has a large technical glossary (not just for MDN), which could be an example to follow. However, I can’t find a link to it at the moment. @sphinx_knight probably knows where it is.

#3

Hello Janet, Ghassan,

I don’t use any technical glossary but https://transvision.mozfr.org/ when I must translate a term which is “broadly” related to Firefox products. Transvision lists strings that are in the devtools which are sometimes useful.

Otherwise, I’ve been checking the French version on Wikipedia for some topics where there might be a debatable wording.

@ghassan.maslamani I’m not really sure there is a way to coerce anyone to a priori use a consistent wording but I’d suggest the following:

  • create a glossary on the page Janet pointed to so that you can give a reference to Arabic editors
  • discuss with existing localizers for Arabic for Firefox and other products: localizers for Mozilla tend to be tech/Web savvy and might have other resources in mind :slight_smile:
  • if you’re not sure what term to use, you can always indicate the original English term aside the translated term
    • For example, in French, one can use italic that way: “Le tableau (array) possède au moins un élément”
  • subscribe to the pages you want to monitor the edits
    • This is pretty helpful since you can monitor all of a “subtree” (e.g. all of the pages under /ar/docs/Web/CSS)
    • This might bring many emails to your inbox too…

In order to subscribe to a page and its subpages, you can use the “eye” button:

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#4

Thank you @jswisher and @sphinx_knight .

I have been advised before to use transvision but it doesn’t seem to cover much of technical terms in Arabic, for example I couldn’t find an entry for “array”.

@sphinx_knight using wikipeida is really good advice I use the same technique when translating personal stuff.

Regarding the glossary page I’ll look it up, for your advice to ask Arabic localizers are you referring to the localizers for l10n because they seem no to be an Arabic team resposible for the translation of MDN to Arabic.

#5

I was referring to other people who contribute to mozilla’s localization https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:Teams:ar not necessarily MDN (but maybe Firefox, SUMO, etc.)
Using this page on the wiki I’m finding some outdated links (a dead link for a glossary :cry:) and a link to a mailing list for Arabic localizers: https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-l10n-ar it might be worth a shot.