Narro

Screenshot

Description

Narro is a web application that allows any number of people to translate at the same time. One ore more coordinators can be nominated to supervise the process.

Narro is Open Source and maintained at code.google.com. There is also a Narro blog and a Narro discussion group.

Mozilla kindly hosts an instance of Narro that you can use to translate Mozilla projects.

How to use it

Try it

First, try it out. Look at it, navigate, register for an account and if you think it's what you want, make a request on the dev-l10n mailing with your Narro username and language to receive rights to maintain your translation there.

These rights include validation, export and import. After receiving these rights, you have to log out and log in again to activate them.

Import

The first thing that you'll need to do is import the project you want to translate. To do this, in the project list access the Manage link.

If you don't see the link, you don't have permissions, so ask for help on the dev-l10n list. Although the Narro installation has nightly updated files of both en-US and your locale, it's up to you to import it. See FAQ to find out why.

Export

Go ahead and export also. This generates an archive that contains two directories with the CVS/HG structure of en-US and your locale. This gives you the oportunity to take stuff out of Narro and work on your own. Also this gives you a directory with your locale ready to be commited.

For some projects, you get a language pack too. It's a link on the project list. Test your translation right after you do it.

Commit

Mozilla uses SSH keys for authentication with versioning systems. This makes it a bit impossible to allow you to commit from Narro, so you have to do it manually.

For Mercurial, follow the steps described in L10n on Mercurial. After you have a directory with your locale, overwrite its content with what you have exported from Narro.

Then, just execute

hg commit
hg push 

inside your locale directory.

For more details on this see L10n on Mercurial

Further information

In Narro, a text can have several translation suggestions. A regular user that has registered can add suggestions and vote other suggestions. However, for those suggestions to be used there has to be someone with validation rights. In order to get validation rights, please send your request on the dev-l10n mailing list specifying your Narro username and language.

If you're the only one who translates, you can validate automatically your suggestions when you're adding them, so don't worry about wasting time.

Narro pulls nightly updates from mozilla's versioning system, so your only job is to translate.

FAQ

• Why do I have to import myself? Couldn't it be done automatically?
  • If the projects would be imported automatically, it would have to be for all languages, but Narro isn't used by all languages, so this would lead to users translating in languages that aren't maintained in Narro, in other words, wasted effort and possibly mad users.

• What file formats are supported ?
  • dtd, ini, properties, inc. The other formats (rdf,js) usually contain configuration variables that you need to adjust them yourself with a regular text editor.