These guidelines are for Translators.

What tool to use

As explained here, the best way to work on translation for your language is to use the Transifex online service.

Transifex has the following distinctive features:

• If multiple translators translate at the same time, you see updates from others in real time. This saves duplication of efforts.
• Transifex has a Glossary, which means that all frequents terms can be underlines and given a tooltip for the best suggested translation. Feel free to update the Glossary for your language and to include comments.
• Transifex has a concordance search feature which allows you to quickly check how a certain word or concept has already been translated in the current file or in other files of the same project.
• Transifex has a "Translation Memory" feature which will suggest a translation if the same string or a similar string has been translated before. Of course you can edit the suggestion.
• Transifex has some warnings when the translation doesn’t seem to respect the variables of the original string.
• Transifex allow you to add comments or open issues to some strings. This way, if you are unsure or you see a problem, you can easily report it.

Guidelines for translating

• When you see a sentence that ends with a dot (.), make sure you also add a dot in the translation. When you se an sentence, without a dot, do NOT add a dot in the translation. Many times b2evolution will actually complete the sentence with a : or add some information in ( and ). Also, in some cases, the sentence is used as a title and we don’t want it to end with a dot.
• When you see abbreviated words in English, it generally means there is a space constraint. Try to keep the translation no longer than 150% of the English text (if course 100% is even better).
• When you see codes like %dor %s in the original string it means that b2evolution will insert some variable text at these places. Make sure you replicate the exact same codes in the translation.
• When you see codes like <, >, », etc. these are HTML entities that will display as special characters. Make sure you replicate them exactly as they appear in the source string. Do NOT replace them with the special character in question. It will break display in b2evolution in certain conditions.
• When you see codes like <br />, these are HTML tags. <br /> means "line Break". It will display as a new line in an HTML page. Make sure you replicate them exactly as they appear in the source string.
• When you see codes like \n or \r, these are special characters. In this case they are used for a new line, for example in plain text messages or in Javascript alert messages. Make sure you replicate them exactly as they appear in the source string.