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 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