Translation Package

We’re glad you’re interested in translating micro.P3.express and making it available to a larger audience. This page provides you with the following:

Approach

Some people use machine translation (e.g., Google Translator) to translate everything into the target language and then review the output and make adjustments. Please don’t do it! It never results in a good enough text that the audience deserves.

Please accept this work only if you have the time and will to do a real translation that the audience would love and appreciate – one you would be proud of!

Initial arrangements

If you’re interested in translating micro.P3.express, make sure you discuss it with one of the coordination team members or contact info@omimo.org first, because other volunteers may already be working on the same target language, in which case, we’ll make arrangements for you to join the existing team if possible.

Amount of work

The translatable content is about 5,300 words, which is equivalent to about 11 pages of standard text.

Questions and problems

If you have any questions about the translation process or the micro.P3.express concepts, feel free to contact us: info@omimo.org

The general approach

You don’t need to be committed to the words and sentences in micro.P3.express; the only important thing is the meaning behind the words. So, feel free to use any construct in the target language that can communicate the meaning in a simple and clear way. If you have doubts about the meaning of something, let us know and we can explain it.

Translating key phrases

There may be different ways of translating a key phrase. Usually, the translation that is more common in the target language is preferred. If you’re not sure how to translate a key phrase, check the existing professional texts in your target language.

For example, if you’re wondering how to translate “wisdom of the crowd”, you can open its English page in Wikipedia, and then use the languages section on the sidebar to open the same page in your target language (if it exists) and see how it is translated: “wijsheid van de massa” in Dutch, “sagesse de la foule” in French, “saggezza della folla” in Italian, etc.

There are many key phrases in common between micro.P3.express and P3.express (e.g., Deliverables Map and Sponsor). For those, the phrase used for micro.P3.express must be the same as that used in the P3.express translation. If the phrase is not as good as it can be, we should adjust it in P3.express first, before using it in micro.P3.express.

This is a list of key phrases in P3.express: key-phrases.txt

It’s a good idea to translate them at the beginning, and use it as a reference throughout the work. This is especially important when there’s more than one volunteer working on a translation, as it makes the output consistent.

Source files

Here’s a compressed file containing all the English source files: manual-en.zip

If you need to use another translation as a proxy, you can find all the existing ones here:

العربیة - Español - فارسی - Suomi - português - русский

Please do NOT change file names.

File formats

Most of the files in this package are markdown files. Their normal file extension is “.md”, but we’ve changed them to “.txt” in this package to make it easier for everyone. You can open and edit them in any text editor, or even in a word processor if you prefer.

Metadata

There’s a metadata block on top of most files. These blocks start and end with --- (three hyphens). You only need to translate the phrase in front of the “title” field of this block and the rest of the lines in this block can be ignored.

Content

What comes after the metadata block is the main content, which is in markdown. Markdown is a simple way of formatting text:

The following extra syntax is used in micro.P3.express:

Finally, remember that paragraphs are separated by one or more empty lines. If you start a new line without leaving an empty line before it, it will be merged into the previous paragraph.

The diagram

The process diagram is generated automatically based on the existing files in the translation package. In general, you don’t have to translate anything other than the text available in the translation package.



Thanks again, and good luck!