Lost in translation

Posted on October 5, 2010 by slicer

One important milestone for any Mumble release is freezing the text-strings. After a freeze, no changes are allowed, which means our translators can start working. For this release, we’d like a bit of help proofing and checking the strings before we freeze them.

The usual method for freezing strings is to export them all to a webpage, load that webpage into Word and use the spelling and grammar checker. This catches the worst mistakes, and there always are quite a few. However, it does not catch nuances of language, and it certainly doesn’t catch wrong information.

As I was looking through the strings for this release, I notice that the tooltip for the bitrate in the audiostats mention that you can adjust the bitrate by changing complexity in the audio settings. We replaced the complexity slider with a direct bitrate slider before 1.2.0, so that text has been wrong for quite a few releases. Thankfully, it appears nobody has noticed.

Translations are one of the last hurdles before 1.2.3 ships, and since translations can’t start until strings are frozen, we need a bit of help. The dev team wrote these strings, and we’ve seen them so many times we aren’t really reading them anymore. It’s therefore hard for us to spot mistakes and errors.

So, if you find any spelling, grammar or textual logic errors in the current snapshot, or in the exported strings, please let us know 🙂

UPDATE: Strings are frozen now. Thanks for your help.