Quarantine time helped me to translate Mautic from almost 0. And this is what I learned

Hi, just want to share my experience about finishing the Hungarian translation on Mautic this morning.

When the quarantine-fatigue kicked in end of April, I needed a project, that requires NO strategical thinking, but commitment and daily brain tickling. An alternative would have been Candy Crush, but I didn’t want to be one of those. (No offense). I also wanted to do something, that helps others, and maybe enlarges the community. Language barrier is serious among average users in Hungary. Listening to @ekke 's Mauticast I realized, that it was the same in Brazil and Japan and the localized version helped a lot to kickstart a community.

When I looked at the strings to translate, it was enormous amount: around 4400 untranslated strings. And luckily I had no idea how many words that is.

Normally I would spend 1-2 hours of driving around every day taking my kids to school, dance, soccer, etc. I didn’t want to replace this time with work, so I designated the newly found time to translate Mautic.

Working with Mautic for 3 years by now, made me think, that I know this software inside out. After all I installed over 100 instances, on-boarded a lot of companies, and do daily support.
Boy I was wrong.
Translating a software is like reading someone’s brain. By translating every text, every explanation and hint made me intimately familiar with Mautic. There are a bunch of old strings as well from obsolete features, which I also had to translate in order to reach 100% in the translation dashboard. It was like a trip down in memory lane. Past mistakes, bad ideas revisited :slight_smile: I found many duplicates (mostly timeframe related strings) as well.
And even after working with Mautic for 3 years almost every day, there are a bunch of features I understand now a lot better thanks to the strings I had to go through.

After around 20 days, spending 2-3 hours a day, I’m done with the first part of the project, the translation is 100% now. I can start testing and perfecting the text, making them more intuitive.

The completed 4400 strings are around 15.000 words, which is around - just to grasp the size - the amount of words in Asimov’s original Nightfall novellete.
http://www.astro.sunysb.edu/fwalter/AST389/TEXTS/Nightfall.htm
Its a great read, give it a shot :slight_smile:

10 Likes

@joeyk firstly, a huge thank you for this effort - what a wonderful thing to do with your time and something that will be of benefit to many in the community!

Would you be willing to work with us to write something up for our community blog about your experiences making this translation? I’m sure it would be an inspiration for other budding translators!