Re: Improving technical arabic translation skills

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Kamal Dalal <kamal at banoora dot net> wrote:
> Currently Arabeyes is hosting a huge repository of translated messages 
> that appear in different software. It would be very useful and educating 
> if one can search for a word(s) and see all the _messages_ that this 
> word appears in, along with the arabic translations. While qamoose is 
> nice for single words translations, it lacks sentence context. Try 
> looking up "settings".

This is not only very doable, but its rather simplistic (a CGI and a
grep in essence), but what I want to point out is the strain that this
puts on the machine.  There are roughly about 2,600 .po files with
some of those files being 2Meg+ in size - to continuously do a grep on
a word or a subsection of words is rather taxing on the host (ie. other
things will get affected dramatically).  If there is a need and the QAC
deems it necessary, we can put all those strings into mysql and query
it - I'm not volunteering for _anything_, I'm just replying to an
innocent query :-)  There needs to be a real need for this and a real
interest in using it.  QaMoose, as you might know, was created for very
similar reasons, yet we see its usage among translators as being
insignificant which makes you think whether more accommodations are wise
without a concentrated effort and buy-in from those that are to use such
a service (forget the 'cool' and 'nice' factors :-)

> AFAIK such a search service is not available at Arabeyes, so one can 
> "cvs co" all files under /translation, grep for stuff locally, then do 
> occasional "cvs update".
> 
> How does this sound ?

If you want to do that on your machine, go for it (as noted its a very
simple thing to do via CGI/grep).

> I am wondering what do others do to improve their technical arabic 
> translation skills.

I think others will have to get whipped into joining and functioning
under QAC's authority.

Salam.

 - Nadim


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