In this presentation, I aim for 6 main things:
- To be as clear as possible to ease the work of the moderator.
- To provide the proper information about the current project.
- To propose the logs of my personal work and interactions with this project.
- To educate the readers about
and the open-source culture.
- To show a model of transparency and accountability toward our community.
- To reach a bigger/larger audience of devoted Netizens.
Project Dissection:
PrestaShop is what we call in the world of the open-source development, a freemium solution. A gamer myself, I believe that most gamers out there know very well the meaning of freemium games/software. (1) But this is not the case here, because we are dealing with something totally different. I personally did not know that we can pair the concept of a freemium solution/product, with an open source e-commerce.
First, to make things clear, let’s start first with the official definition of this platform directly from the company itself, and the information is as the following: (2)
“PrestaShop is an efficient and innovative e-commerce solution with all the features you need to create an online store and grow your business.”
And according to the website, this platform aims for one important thing which is “Our mission is to develop world-class eCommerce software through open source innovation. Together with our community, we provide software that enables everyone to have a successful eCommerce business”. (3)
And this is exactly where things get interesting, PrestaShop does not have something really revolutionary compared to the other FOSS that I worked on. But by digging deeper, I discovered that this project has something that not all the projects I've worked on have. A big and dedicated, diversified and loyal community. The project on Crowdin has over 190k words; but still, people are competing me in finishing the translation of my own language, which I personally find very great and very encouraging. Projects are always easier to tackle when there is a huge community around it. I am pretty sure that at the time of writing these words, strings are being pushed for my language. The sense of collectivism is really strong around this project, and I really wish all projects hade the same dedication from the PO.
With approximatively 200-250k shops around the world, and used in more than 163 countries, with more than 60 languages available. (4) This platform is really a big player in the field of the eCommerce industry.
PrestaShop has also more than 300 built-in features for managing the product lists, payments, shipping, manufacturers and suppliers. In addition to this, it uses a web template system that allows users to customize their stores and add new features by adding the add-ons. (5)
One other interesting thing I stated above is that the platform proposes and I quote “A Powerful Freemium Open Source Solution with International Reach”. The company is really trying all the possible capabilities and services to enhance the experience of the users/customers, and at the same time, the profitability of the stores. To find our way in this maze, I will directly quote the point of view that the company stated about this model: (6)
"With its completely free solution that is available for download, PrestaShop offers endless opportunities to help merchants succeed! The company has teamed up with more than 80 industry-leading partners, such as PayPal and OVH, and offers 3,500 modules for payments, logistics, sales promotions, and more, all aimed at improving a store's features."
The Why:
The question of why will always be a question of the omnipotent nature of the virtue, genuineness, conviction, ethics, and value. Thus, I will allow myself to share the same convictions I hold most dear. Fare from the scourge, of the oblivion world!
The question of why I’m doing this project is quite hard to answer for many reasons when
Is doing something for free a key factor in defining a true dedication for a community or an idea? or it is more like a question of values and the amount of intellect and time invested to do good? I can argue that the architecture of the world of today can lead us to see idealism as some kind of illusion, a country for the weakest, for people who can’t face reality; yet, I have always wondered why it was so difficult to exercise and apply an idealistic model of working, it must be us! which lead me to my next point.
In my time working as a language manager, I came to a few conclusions that I already pointed out in my article. One of those conclusions is that the open-source culture is not really for everyone. Thanks to the few events that happened lately, we had an idea and a distilled conclusion at the same time. The neural system of
Theoretically, I am quite sure that any initiative based in an open-source environment, will always have the same issues that we are having here in
Well, why I’m here? I’m playing the role of the dragon's teeth (Drachenzähne) against those waves of realism! … This is just a granular contribution compared to the whole matrix of the open-source world.
Thanks to issues the raised after my first contribution on this project, we had to do a lot of investigation with the project owner and managers to try and find a solution that we had with the project. Those issues are mainly related to the gender issue and the RTL support. I must say here that we had a lot of chance with this project, because, on other projects, the time to respond for a simple request, or just a question can take years, or we can even never get an answer. The cooperation from the project managers was excellent, which allowed us, of course, to solve many issues in a small period of time. And I will for sure try to pinpoint all the issues and the solutions that we found in the section below.
The translation was quite fast, this project is easy to go through because of its nature, yet, one of the major problems that I faced with this project while I was proofreading, and translating by the same occasion, is that there are just too many proofreaders, which resulted to many incoherencies. Too many approved translations are not coherent, the meanings of many strings collide, and of course, you will find many words with a completely different interpretation pushed and approved. This situation is very frustrating to the point where you do not know what to choose, especially when you see that even the account of the PO himself pushed wrong or incoherent strings.
The project is challenging in a sense where there is a lot of vocabulary used in the previous strings, the terminology is really diverse, and finishing this project will be more like a journey to filter and find the right word than dealing with the level of difficulty. I personally try to enjoy any work I do, because I believe that people will do good when they are doing something they enjoy.
There are also some interesting changes that I made to enhance the presentation of my contribution, which I will try to point out in the next section.
In this section, you can see some kind of logs I used to print each time more information was needed to understand the functionality of some concepts/terms/words. This will also allow the reviewer and readers to clearly understand the nature of some choices that I made in some strings, and hopefully, to encourage any discussion about the betterment of the translation if needed.
On top of this, I’m sure that everyone can benefit from some information printed here. I actually did learn many things, and I hope the people who are going to read this contribution will feel the same as I did … smarter!
The information that I printed here must serve only as a guide to follow up my translation issues logs. If you want more information about these logs, I suggest you check the links at end of this contribution.
[Situational]
Thankfully, I had many good feedbacks from my last contribution, good in a sense where they allowed me to discover many mistakes that I made. I was personally very surprised when I saw that many duplicates in my presentation, I usually write my presentation first on a word file, then copy-cut the segments of texts in the presentation box. After that, I will have a quick look to see if everything is fine and well written. Nonetheless, duplicates were there waiting to be found, I think this teaches us a lot about the work of a proofreader, a second aye. A second revision is always a good idea. The proofreading is meant to solve those kinds of problems, or shall I say unforeseen mistakes. This gives us the idea that being meticulous is sometimes not enough, and also that we are all prone to error.
The second issue that I faced with the presentation is the compatibility, or how both browsers (Firefox and Chrome) deal with the text formatting, I decided this time to write the presentation using Chrome, to see if there will be any problem with the formatting. Another issue in the same context was the weird spacing between the words in some paragraphs, but in this case, I am suspecting that the justify code <div class|text-justify|> used to make the text more uniform is the cause.
One other thing that I want to point out with the presentation is something that I have never given importance or care to. Thanks to the fruited feedback, I know now that more care should be given to the different variant of the English language (Behavior - Behaviour). Yet, we need to say it, this does not have a huge importance on how people speak or chat with each other. However, it is mandatory to use one and only specific variant when people are translating a project, or writing a scientific paper and so forth, I thing that anything that relates to the professional world must be very specific about using a proper and coherent English. I would not say that I am well aware of all the differences of all the words, but I am for sure really open to learning anything new to improve myself.
The gender issue will and will always be present while translating a project. Indeed, in the Arabic language, it is very difficult to find the right gender for a string especially if the project does not provide any proper context for the word, this is why the question of gender is always something very difficult to tackle. And the thing that I noticed is that even when asking the PO or managers about this, the silence is usually a sign that this issue is too big to be solved. In English you can easily use "You" to define 1.2.3 people in addition to both genders, but in Arabic, everything is different. I will try here to give an example just to clear up thing:
| Gender.count | Pronouns | English | Pronouns | Arabic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 people (M) | You | Need | أنت | تَحْتَاجُ |
| 2 people (M) | You | Need | أنتما | تَحْتَاجَانِ |
| 3 people (M) | You | Need | أنتم | تَحْتَاجُونَ |
| 1 people (F) | You | Need | أنتِ | تَحْتَاجِينَ |
| 2 people (F) | You | Need | أنتما | تَحْتَاجَانِ |
| 3 people (F) | You | Need | أنتن | تَحْتَجْنَ |
Please bear in mind that this is Arabic, the table above is just a granular example of the Arabic language complexity.
To solve this issue, we decided to unify our way of working. Since it is highly impractical to always ask for gender specification, we decided to always go with the (Male variables), and use a neutral sentance when possible. But, this rule will only apply to a specific type of projects such as eCommerce projects. In other projects, this rule will be very detrimental to the content, one of those projects is the Curious expedition project. This later will for sure need more precision and care when dealing with the gender issue, and the rule that we set for the eCommerce project is undeniably not something to consider. As I said, and will always say to the translators in my team, every project has its own soul, thus, we should treat each project with a different mindset.
I think one of the issues that I enjoyed a lot the fact that we finally reached a final solution for it is the RTL issue. I must say that this problem is not only related to this project, becuase we are also having the same issue in many other projects. To start with, @Libanista was the catalyzer of a long and fruited investigation that we made to find out how to deal with codes/variables when translating, this is why I followed many questions to the PO and one of the managers. I think in the first place we received the same generic response that we always receive when we ask these kinds of questions on older/other projects, the developer team will always emphasize the importance of keeping the variables/codes at the right places, because tampering with the variables will endanger the integrity of the strings.
Well, this is really not helpful, a manager told me that the Persian language is just fine, and maybe we can deal with the issue as they did, but after few hours a second message was sent to me by a manager to tell me that the variables should not be changed, a paradox. I followed a few detailed questions about the issue because pushing the string when keeping the variables as their original format is impossible, for the reason that Crowdin front-end will not detect the variables when pushing the input.
After a few testings and back and forth with the project team, the developers concluded that the variables should not be touched even if they seem incorrect. Thus, we should only translate the content of a string and leave the variables/codes alone. All the translator in my team are well aware of that now.
To conclude this case, I must thank Louise Bonnard for being very responsive with us about this issue other iformation. The truth is that our work can be a lot easier on all projects if they had the same level of assistance we hade on this project.
This is not an issue but more like a shout-out to the people who are genuine and always do their possible to help the other people. Previously, many problems were found because of the variables/gender issue on the Curious Expedition project, and what I really liked is that all the LMs that were affected because of these issues have tried to do their best to help to find a solution. The LM 
I think we all here have an obligation to be honest and genuine, and the information that can help other translators or language moderators should not be seen as an ACE CARD, or to monopolize the information, or even to not disclose the knowledge about a specific information, just to play and game the system for personal gain.
Trivia
- I believe that a difference between a low-quality contribution and a good quality contribution is equal to the time a translator is willing to invest genuinely on a project/contribution.
- The the thumbnail image contains the logo of the project, the logo of utopian, and a DaVinci logo is available to use under CC0 on seeklogo.com. the whole/final design was done by me.
(2) https://www.prestashop.com/en
(3) https://www.prestashop.com/en/about-us
(4) press-releases/2014/10/01/internationalization-and-open-source-drive-growth-for-prestashop
(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PrestaShop#cite_note-1
(6) https://danlargo.com/2012/03/29/the-freemium-business-model/
(7) https://crowdin.com/profile/LouiseBonnard
[F.W.count: Final Word Count] | [T.W.count: Total Word Count]
| W.C | Untranslatables | F.W.C | T.W.C | P.% | C.T | Cont.Num |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
~1128 | ~94 | ~1034 | 5604 | 91 | 10-05/10-07 | 3 |