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Improving the English interface Type of page »  Projects

Proposed Changes to English Strings

 Warning
All information for end users to be able to translate should be in a workspace on tiki.org



There are many errors and nonstandard or otherwise questionable word choices in Tiki's English text, so I went through lang/en/language.php to make changes.

But I found a message in the cvs history that English terms had been put in comments for better efficiency (in almost all cases, strings in templates are the same as the displayed text). So I asked on the dev mailing list if I should commit the changes, which would mean about 200 strings (or more, I was trying to change only the most obvious cases) no longer commented out.

mose gave his opinion that it doesn't make sense to translate English strings into other English, which makes sense of course. It's better to have correct words/phrases in the files to begin with. So here's a suggestion on how to proceed.

Things needing to be changed

  • Spelling errors

  • English usage and syntax errors
    All kinds of problems here including the familiar run-on sentences like "Permission denied you cannot edit this page"
  • Inconsistent use of same terms
    Including Tikiwiki, ))TikiWiki((, Tiki, and tiki, all referring to the same thing, and weblogs and blogs, etc.
  • I also thought it would be good form to soften the permission denied errors by saying something like Sorry, but you don't have permission to....

How to do the update

  1. First of all, the changes should be agreed on. For example
    I'm thinking instances of weblog should be changed to blog, since the shorter form is now so common and the older one seems out of date.
    A number of module titles aren't really the best English IMHO. Top visited sites, I think, should be Most-visited sites or Top sites. In cases like this, changing en/language.php will have a signficant effect, and people might have different opinions about the best terms to use, so there should be discussion about the changes first. I can make a page with a table of proposed changes, for people to check if they are interested.
  2. After there is consensus about the changes, the en language file can be changed, with the new versions of strings replacing the previous ones in both left and right sides of the lines, and all commented out as before.
  3. Then the original strings in Tiki files that have been updated will have to be updated to match.
  4. Finally, the other language files should be updated (I think), so that the template strings are the same as in the template files, etc. and the English lang file.
    About this, care should be taken not to change the actual meaning of the updated strings, so the translations remain accurate. If there are cases where the meaning might be slightly different, it'd be good to notify translators somehow so language files can be updated.
  5. Also I guess it would be good to try to do the same update process for the 1.10 versions of all these files, but I'm not sure of the best way to go about that.

Etc.

If I'm off base about anything here, please comment, edit, or whatever. I'll do whatever file updating I can, if that's the way to go, at a calm time between releases.



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