Remaining translations is just tons of garbage

Swedish is now 87% translated. (Earlier this year it was 103%.)

Today I translated "Nov 30th" to "30 nov" for every day of October, November and December. Exactly how does that make any sense?

The remaining translations are things like "swe", "lit" and "ger", apparently language abbreviations used in URLs, that should never be translated, "Swap/:" (where exactly is that used with the slash followed by colon?) and about a hundred strings that contains a tag and some phrase in Dutch or Finnish.

Going through the list of remaining translations is just a big embarrasement. How can there be so much garbage in there? Is nobody keeping the system clean? It used to be OK this summer, but it has gone downhill very quickly.

Hey, the system adds these phrases if the code calls for them. Apparently somewhere it's got the date bracketed inside a translate function.

I'll take a look at it.

T

>2 timspalding:

While you look at those LA2 mentioned, would you, please, look also these I wrote about in my message:
what is this: Covers/21947174/details?

Thanks. This is a good one.

Anyway, I've cleaned the system out of these phrases. It's adding them back as the program "needs" them. I'm watching Swedish closely. I found three places where something was being asked for that was weird. Translating a translation is the worst, since it produces a sort of "square" of all translations—and every translation added makes it worse! Then there were MARC codes which Chris was asking for translations of, etc.

Anyway, I've got a good system now. We can't guarantee this won't happen again, but I will watch it the rest of today and, in future, post along these lines will be easier for me to understand and fix.

Meanwhile, Swedish has at least ten good pieces untranslated—the horror!

Incidentally, if you see obvious garbage, don't translate it. It's either useless (the dates) or actually harmful—translations of translations of translations...

Garbage is gathering again, not much but some. Among the untranslated things there are expressions like
Cpe
Tiny_includes
Commonknowledge/:

tiny includes!

Irritating. Thanks. They're gone.

And I found where most were coming from—crazy bots doing crazy thing with URLs and Javascript. Computer are dumb.

>9 timspalding:
Computer are dumb

Yes, they are, but fortunately they obey nicely if you know how...

And thanks for sorting out the garbage. We are now in 99.9 % again. Of course that percentage doesn't tell the whole truth - there are quite a lot of texts that cannot be translated, especially on the new pages (add book pages, Common Knowledge etc.).

CK needs to be done. It's all Chris' code and most of the problems came from it, frankly, so I need to spend some time with him explaining how it works better. (People aren't dumb, but if you throw something at them without explaining, they screw up.) Ditto Add books, although that also suffers from the fact that we like to avoid asking for translations until a feature-set has stabilized.

>11 timspalding:
Let them stabilize, there is no hurry. It just that the 99.9 % looks too good...

More garbage on remaining untranslated things:
Index.php5
Reviews Tirsdag den. 18
etc.

There are words Beacon and Surveys, too - need those be translated, I wonder?

Thanks. Common Knowledge is my bane.

There are words Beacon and Surveys, too - need those be translated, I wonder?

Gosh, I don't know. I wonder where they came from?

Would somebody, please, do some cleaning up again:
translate.php?page=555693825

It is difficult to see what to translate and what not. If things like this are among translatable things for long, somebody will try to translate them:

Search?q=elizabeth bishop the fish
" target="NewWindow
Stringhttp:
Favicon.ico
Reviews Tirsdag den. 18

>5 timspalding:
if you see obvious garbage, don't translate it...

People are translating the "garbage", see the translations page:
Recent edits. If it is harmful, there should be a note in the beginning of every translation page.

Well, I'm the one that has "translated" that garbage. What I do is just click the "okay as is" check when I see that it is garbage, as I look for more untraslated texts in a page searching for that text.

Is it really harmful? If so, I'll stop translating them.

>17 frsantos:

Tim said in message 5 that it can be harmful. I don't know the details.

Edited to add:

When you translate "garbage" bits they disappear from the untranslated texts page but they appear on those pages where they belong. If you look the translation page of e.g. work page, you see what I mean (link is to the Spanish page):
Slaughterhouse-five (Matadero Cinco)

It's not harmful per se. It's just that I can't see where the problems are.

Mmm, OK, so, no garbage translations. Got it.

Bumping up. Garbage is splattering all over translations pages again.

What's more : some of the most avid "translators" seem to aim at translating (?) all of this. Worse yet : they do not read this group AND do not permit comments at their profile page AND do not provide any email address.

I think--but of course, I 'll not have it my way, will I ?--that any translator/translations editor SHOULD provide for a way to be contacted. The most easy solution is by accepting comments at his profile page.

Additional question :
Is there a way to clean up the garbage even if it has got "translated" ?

There are so many these kinds of rows that I couldn't count them:
maj 5 at

You can guess the amount of "garbage" by looking the percentages on translations page. The percentages have dropped dramatically. Polish is first on the list with 56.9%.

Sorry. I'll deal with these tomorrow. There must be some translation within a translation.

> 23

That's Nirwana for most avid "translators"--and proud they are. Hey, have a look at their translating statistics : wow ! Their scores are just rocketing--and of course : proud they are !

FYI : The same "drive" is happening with LTL : some most avid venue adders happen to carbon copy existing venue entries and sequentially deleting the older entries, thus superseeding existing venue entries and replacing them by "theirs"--even if the latter are less accurate.

I imagine it's all about showing off and feeling so proud. Wow ! Poor them.

I imagine that that's why some once avid LT supporters and high quality data contributors are and have been abandoning LT.

FYI : They are NOT running in a huff. Then again, they are quite disappointed indeed. Alas, it seems that TPTB couldn't care less.

>25 boekerij:

boekerij, your message 25 is beside the point.

I've cleaned out all the old, wrong translations--the junk ones. They were all traced to a single line of code in the "events" function, which is used on various pages, and which involved translating a date and then translating the result.

I've got a script now that detects these things, so we can find them, and also deletes them

>27 timspalding:
Thank you, Tim. Looks much better now.

Do you think that at some point you could check also the things that are mentioned in topic list of things that cannot be translated?

The garbage has been gathering again...
I hope that somebody has time to do some cleaning.

The remaining page takes forever to load because of the junk. There are also translation pages that have so much things that aren't supposed to be translated that it is difficult to find the one thing you want to translate, e.g. this one (Finnish):
http://fi.librarything.com/translate.php?page=1272544190

Translating some pages is difficult because of the junk. Please, would somebody help and clean up?

Okay, I'm going to reset it now. And see what starts popping up—and therefore from where it it's popping up.

Everything will go yellow in a sec.

Not seeing any junk. Grumble. Watching, watching...

http://fi.librarything.com/translate.php?remaining=1

Um, suddenly everything that should be and used to be translated on the German page is not.

Ok, and now it's back to normal. hmm.

Yes. It's going to be doing that. Basically it stores what needs to be translated. As I find problems and kill them, I need to reset the "what's translated" list. Every time I do that, everything goes yellow for one time.

I found one major source of junk, where it was trying to translate the language codes (por, eng, etc.). Looking for more.

T

Thanks! Looks much better now!

There were lots of roles for authors and contributors in different languages (e.g. KääNt., Adapté par, TÕlkija, Fotograf, Übersetzer). I think those have been coming from the library records (subfield e of the MARC fields 100 and 700).

I think I've got most of them. Roles still seem a problem.

Okay, thats the answer to my question.!! Thanks. Without yellow stuf its so much more easy to the eyes.

But I keep having questions. Couls anybody give me a link to a topic where I can ask them. This one is about translation from Eng --> Dutch!

>38 connie53:
If you mean that you have a question about translating LibraryThing, you can ask your question in this group. Just start a new topic and describe the problem in the subject line. Many of the translating LTers follow this group. But if it is about something else, there are several Dutch groups:

http://www.librarything.com/groups/language/dut

Maybe some of them can help you.

Okay, I just slew the worst offender—double translating of roles. I apologize. I find it rather hard to explain how seriously translation must be taken when coding...

There are again lots of remaining untranslated things that are not meant to be translated: names of books, names of authors, words in other languages than English, snippets of code etc.

And these:
Edit to localize it to the Arabic one. If I am on the Finnish language site, I am not likely to localize it to the Arabic (or some other language). Shouldn't these tips appear only on the appropriate language sites?

I haven't been in LibraryThing for a while, but the garbage situation has not improved at all. When I open the translate page of the book page, there are all kinds of things there that should not be translated:

Book_tiny.png
Ajax_saveCollectionsForRecentlyAdded.php
InnerHTML.xml
Javascript:eda
Languagemenu=true;
piano begeleiding
Avec la contribution de
原著
marraskilaria
(KÄÄnt.).
etc.

I wish they would go away.

The problem is still there or maybe it has returned. In either case, there are loads of roles and computer commands etc. that obscures the view of what actually needs to be translated. I would really appreciate some spring cleaning! Thanks in advance!

E.t.a.
It's the translation into Esperanto that I've been working on during the past week where I noticed the problem.

Yes, most languages are showing fewer and fewer percent translated, because translators are giving up.

Maybe one should implement a "flag" message feature. Similar to pictures without proper copyright and spam posts / intrusions, exploits etc. Or something similar to "polls". That would illustrate the importance / priority.

P.S. 2012-04-02 added
☛ "PollsLT" ?searchtype=talk&search=PollsLT

>45 gangleri: Well, that would give an indication of how many people find something important, but not of how urgent those people find the change.

The number of translators is extremely small in comparison to the total number of users. But the translators perform a crucially important task and to them this is extremely important, but it would still recieve very few flags since most people probably couldn't care less.

I take it you're running a clean-up right now?
Much appreciated! Thanks!

Wow, this translational database must be HUGE! Almost 24 hours and still chewing...

This brings me to my question: What ARE we supposed to do with book titles, roles etc. that are not to be translated. (They will accumulate again, I assume?) Is it allright or not to click the "okay as is" and move them untranslated to the translated snippets in order to get rid of them from the lists of remaining translations? I do not find the answers above totally clear regarding this. Will that make the site slower and/or make it more difficult for fellow translators, translating into other languages?

Thanks again for this! It's so nice not having to scroll through all that junk! Also, the percentage figure for translations into Esperanto has jumped from 36% to something like 55% :-)