Info request about your translation process for "7.0 Getting Started Guide"

Hi Brazilian LibreOffice Team!

My name is Valter Mura, one of the Italian localizzation team coordinators,
and I recently read the good article about the launch of the 7.0 Getting
Started Guide in Brazilian Portuguese [1]

As we (as team) found your work great, we would like to know, if possible,
which steps you've followed in order to achieve this important goal, and the
tools used for it.

Presently our latest complete "publication" is for LibreOffice 3.5 (Getting
Started)

As we read the article, a light of hope was lit on the horizon, the hope of
bridging the gap between the work already done and that still to be done.

We use OmegaT to translate documentation strings, and reuse the TM we created.

I thank you in advance for any information you can provide, and I congratulate
you again for the excellent work you are doing.

[1][https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/04/02/the-brazilian-community-launches-the-libreoffice-7-0-getting-started-guide-in-portuguese/]

Ciao

Hi Valter

Thanks for the kind words.

We found that machine translation has evolved to be considered for our use, and a handy way to break the language barrier. Technical English used in our guides is well rendered by the translation service we used. It may be the case for Italian too, I hope so.

We think that sub-optimal Portuguese is better than no Portuguese at all. But MT is not ready to unleash without a human review. By eliminating the language barrier, it was easy for local doc team to jump in and review the output of the MT service.

We estimate a translation hit up to 90-95% acceptable. Some mistakes slips in, and is part of the fun to chase them.

Unlike OmegaT, which is an excellent tool for desktop, we used matecat.com to upload a Guide chapter, translate "as-is" and download for review. Translation of a chapter takes 10 seconds.

The service handles ODT files and formatting is fully preserved. The service is free, you can also open an account and upload your translation memory from OmegaT to improve results (not tested).

We also decided to do the translation only once and break the link to the English guides. From now on, the Brazilian guides will just rewrite the changes of the English guide directly in Portuguese, and we will not run further machine translations of the same guide. We have also rewritten parts of the guides that we will suggest for upstream, in a 2-way collaboration.

matecat.com is open source (github) and a service run by a startup with sponsor of by 2 European universities and an Italian foundation.

Kind regards

Olivier

In data giovedì 8 aprile 2021 19:27:35 CEST, Olivier Hallot ha scritto:

Hi Valter

Thanks for the kind words.

We found that machine translation has evolved to be considered for our
use, and a handy way to break the language barrier. Technical English
used in our guides is well rendered by the translation service we used.
It may be the case for Italian too, I hope so.

We think that sub-optimal Portuguese is better than no Portuguese at
all. But MT is not ready to unleash without a human review. By
eliminating the language barrier, it was easy for local doc team to jump
in and review the output of the MT service.

We estimate a translation hit up to 90-95% acceptable. Some mistakes
slips in, and is part of the fun to chase them.

Unlike OmegaT, which is an excellent tool for desktop, we used
matecat.com to upload a Guide chapter, translate "as-is" and download
for review. Translation of a chapter takes 10 seconds.

The service handles ODT files and formatting is fully preserved. The
service is free, you can also open an account and upload your
translation memory from OmegaT to improve results (not tested).

We also decided to do the translation only once and break the link to
the English guides. From now on, the Brazilian guides will just rewrite
the changes of the English guide directly in Portuguese, and we will not
run further machine translations of the same guide. We have also
rewritten parts of the guides that we will suggest for upstream, in a
2-way collaboration.

matecat.com is open source (github) and a service run by a startup with
sponsor of by 2 European universities and an Italian foundation.

Kind regards

Olivier

> Hi Brazilian LibreOffice Team!
>
> My name is Valter Mura, one of the Italian localizzation team
> coordinators,
> and I recently read the good article about the launch of the 7.0 Getting
> Started Guide in Brazilian Portuguese [1]
>
> As we (as team) found your work great, we would like to know, if possible,
> which steps you've followed in order to achieve this important goal, and
> the tools used for it.
>
> Presently our latest complete "publication" is for LibreOffice 3.5
> (Getting
> Started)
>
> As we read the article, a light of hope was lit on the horizon, the hope
> of
> bridging the gap between the work already done and that still to be done.
>
> We use OmegaT to translate documentation strings, and reuse the TM we
> created.
>
> I thank you in advance for any information you can provide, and I
> congratulate you again for the excellent work you are doing.
>
> [1][https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/04/02/the-brazilian-comm
> unity-launches-the-libreoffice-7-0-getting-started-guide-in-portuguese/]
>
> Ciao

--
Olivier Hallot
LibreOffice Documentation Coordinator
Rio de Janeiro - Brasil - Local Time: UTC-03:00
LibreOffice – free and open source office suite: https://www.libreoffice.org
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http://tdf.io/joinus

--

Hi Olivier

thank you for your prompt reply and information. I put Marina in copy in order
to check your method with her and then to discuss it with the all other guys
of our team.
Maybe we will contact you again for further infos :slight_smile:

Thanks again

Ciao