Upcoming changes for the Arabic language translations

Announcements
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A new Open edX deployment owner will be doing changes for the translations of Open edX. As a native Arabic speaker I found those changes to be generally good and better than what we have. This discussion have taken place in [WIP][BB-3676] Add support for ar_SA language by farhaanbukhsh · Pull Request #26495 · edx/edx-platform · GitHub.

However, there’s few changes to the glossary which some existing maintainers may not like.

@farhaanbukhsh is leading this effort with the OpenCraft team and he provided the following example of the changes:

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I found the language and grammer to be superiour to the existing ones in terms of grammer and language fluency.

@farhaanbukhsh can share more about the timeline of those changes and what kind of feedback can be take.

History of Arabic language maintenance

The Arabic language translations on Transifex had been maintained by Edraak from the period 2014 to 2018. Afterward Edraak switched to a dedicated Transifex repo which left the Open edX Arabic language translations without an active owner (that I know of).

That didn’t stop it from achieving 95% translation rate which makes it the second most translated language!

My role in Arabic Open edX

I’ve been involved in Open edX as a contributor since 2014. I still actively contribute twoards i18n but no longer focus or lead the Arabic language efforts as I used to. If you do work actively on the Arabic translations in Open edX, please join and post something on the #arabic Slack channel.

What do you think?

If you’re maintaining an Arabic instance, please share your thoughts here.

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Thanks @omar for the announcement :slight_smile: I would be more than happy to help in this effort. Right now we don’t have a timeline but in case we do, I will update here.

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Thank you @omar . I would like to add that Edraak’s translation was built on users’ feedback too; so it is a pretty good translation.

@farhaanbukhsh some of the new translations are toward perfection, for example (Problem) already changed by Edraak to (المسألة) in their new repo. The new one above is without (الـ) . I would like to ask you to pass a few hints for the translation team on your side, it’s something I observed from Edraak’s experience (my view as an end-user, not a professional translator):

  • Use Tashkeel when you can: it is very helpful to have them. For example: (محدَّد ، مُتلعلِّمين ، أُنشئ)
  • You can avoid sticking to the words if you see it better: for example, I see the old (يوجد حساب مسبق) more expressive than the new (يوجد بالفعل)
  • You can leave few modern words untranslated: for example, the term (video file) is translated in many websites as (ملف مرئي). But, doesn’t that confuse it with (visual file)?

Also please pass my big thanks to the translation team for their efforts :slight_smile:

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@shadinaif thanks a lot for the hints :slight_smile:

I will make sure to pass your hints and thanks to the team :slight_smile: