Coin Compendium testing begins!

[fwang2450]

1. "Internationalization" means preparing software for localization, which includes adding Unicode support, separating programming codes from translatable text (resource strings), removing concatenation (avoid cutting one resource string into several pieces), supporting different time/date/currrency/measurement units, among others. Without internationalization, localization is error prone and inefficient. The codes on the pages need to be removed to facilitate translation. If a professional translator like me finds it difficult to leave the codes intact, amateur volunteers will be at a loss.

2. An example of the Facebook translation list is attached. This string is already translated into several versions. The user can provide a new translation, or vote for existing translations.

3. The translation memory function was not working, because when I tried to translate the same word, I did not see any prompt for existing translations. The commercial TM tools translators use are not open access.

[dobedo]

Looks like FuzzyBot wiped out many (except 1) pieces of fwang2450's Simplified Chinese translation on the Main Page, as well as some on the same Main Page for regular Chinese translation. Although this is just a test page to play with, good translation already in place by others should not be undone. Or maybe this is a new feature of the translation memory (loss) system? :-)

[badon]

The translations were "lost" because I reconfigured the translation units according to fwang2450's instructions. Since the translation units are different now, the old translations became invalid. If translation memory were working, I assume the translations wouldn't be totally lost. It seems everything is working like it's supposed to except the translation memory.

You can probably still see the old translations in the page history, if you want to do some copy and paste with it.

[fwang2450]

Badon, the re-worked main page is cleaner. But in trying to hide the codes, sentences were broken up, causing concatenation, which is another taboo in localization, because 1. the context is lost; 2. the word order often needs to be re-arranged in translation, which is not possible if words are separated from each other. Can you replace the codes with some symbols and leave the sentence structure intact?

I uploaded more entries into the glossary. I thought I could cover years up to 2000, but ended up only reaching 1994. I will keep working on it.

[fishball]

Badon, the re-worked main page is cleaner. But in trying to hide the codes, sentences were broken up, causing concatenation, which is another taboo in localization, because 1. the context is lost; 2. the word order often needs to be re-arranged in translation, which is not possible if words are separated from each other. Can you replace the codes with some symbols and leave the sentence structure intact?

+1. I tried translating some to traditional Chinese as a test but had some difficulty because the sentence doesn't make sense in Chinese without the full sentence context. Just did the best I could and left some blank but still can be improved I reckon.

[badon]

There is a documentation feature that should help with that. It should only take me a few minutes to add an example of the whole sentence so translators can see the context. I'll do that right now.

[badon]

I found some features that I think are supposed to let me leave the whole sentences intact, while at the same time hiding the code that can't be translated. I think I will have to redo the translation setup for the main page, which means current translations will be invalidated. But, since it's a small page, and we're still experimenting, I think it will be OK. It will take me a bit more time to do that, since I'm trying to do a few different things at once :)

[dobedo]

I uploaded more entries into the glossary. I thought I could cover years up to 2000, but ended up only reaching 1994. I will keep working on it.

fwang2450 & badon, For any term describing a coin pertaining to a specific year I'd suggest that we add "(year)" or "[year]" as a prefix to its English entry, e.g., "(1989) God of Goodness." General terms not specific to a coin-year we could keep them in their current format. What do you think? Later on we may even consider break them into 2 subtables, where year-coin entries may be first sorted by year.

[badon]

OK, I think I have finished reconfiguring the translation setup for the main page. It should be much easier to translate now. Let me know if anything else needs to be improved.

Also, what's the difference between "Chinese" and "Simplified Chinese"?

[fishball]

I assumed your definition of Chinese meant Traditional Chinese (Taiwan/Hong Kong) because Simplified Chinese was already there (Mainland China).

But later I saw that there is zh-yue which covers that. In fact I think "Chinese" by itself is redundant since there are so many dialects in China.

There are subtle differences between the Canton and Taiwan version of Traditional Chinese, especially for day to day usage.

[badon]

Yeah, I think "Chinese" might be there for technical completeness, and not for any practical reason. I've never seen anyone use it as a serious translation target. Since there are translations in the history for that, I won't delete it yet. When the simplified Chinese version is translated, then I'll see if I can remove the generic Chinese link and delete the page it currently leads to.

I think recently "Canadian" English was added to a newer version of this translation system. The differences between American English and Canadian English are so subtle, I'm surprised somebody bothered to create it. I don't even know how many languages are available for translation with this system, but I think it's something like 600, in all sorts of dialects. Some of them are for illiterate cultures that never even had a written language until the issue of translation made it necessary.

I hope this translation system turns out to be a good choice for the CC. So far, it seems to be able to provide for the demanding professional translation needs of fwang2450...when I get the translation memory feature working.

[fwang2450]

For some reason I did not receive any email reminder that there were new posts here. I was busy with the glossary. I now have covered all the way up to 2000. The issue I found was that when time drew nearer, there were more and more coins missing from the CC. I had to use a lot of TBDs in the English column, because I did not want to invent the English translations. This brings up a question. It is well known that after 2000, the China Gold Coin Co. shifted their focus to the Chinese market. Are there serious collectors of Chinese coins after 2000 in the US? Does the CC plan to add the missing coins? I have to decide whether to turn to translation of the site, or to continue with the glossary.

As for adding the Year feature, I mentioned it in one of my earlier emails. Technically, it is much easier to add another column showing the year than to add a year before the English of each coin. In my Excel sheet, I do have a column listing the year, but I leave it out when copying data to the site. If it is considered a necessary feature, I can easily add the year info.

I will test out the improved translation tool. By the way, is there a staging environment for the site? To a user, seeing the Chinese versions come and go must be confusing. At least a note needs to be posted telling users we are testing localization.

[badon]

Ideally there should be a "staging area" for testing changes to the main page, but I neglected to do that initially, and it appears we're already capable of providing the translations. I have partially implemented a rollout system where changes will appear on only a few thousand pages at a time, so I can contain a disaster if something doesn't work right. As the main page becomes more sophisticated, I can certainly do the same thing there too.

But, now that we have a translation system that seems to work well for most of its promised functionality (only missing translation memory), I will have to redesign the site to make it fully or nearly-fully translatable. The site has been mostly in a feature freeze for quite a while now, and I'm looking forward to being able to start working on improvements. The translation system is the only major new feature added for quite a while.

Yes, there are collectors of coins dated 2000 and newer in the U.S., and all of those types will get added eventually. Right now our data entry team is focused on modern Chinese coins dated 2003 and earlier. I am currently working on expanding our team, so hopefully some experts will pop out of the woodwork to help us with types of coins that I'm not familiar with.

The long range plan is to cover ALL coins that are worthy of the trouble to enter them into the CC. My study of the scalability of the site says that we will run into scaling problems if we try to do that all one unified data system. So, I'm starting to think that we may end up splitting the CC into completely separate systems to cover all the different types of coins throughout history, and throughout the world. That should scale well, and although it'll be a big project to split an established system, I think that's doable with automated bots.

But, since we're almost exclusively focused on modern Chinese coins right now, I think we can avoid those challenges by setting things up with a good plan for growth. In short, it appears that our current Coin Compendium is going to end up being just the first of a large team of them that will be brought online when we're ready to make another push for expansion.

[fwang2450]

The translation tool is much handier now. The major obstacles are removed. I would say it can be used for translation. Some guidelines/tutorial are needed. I have taken some notes which can be developed into a brief tutorial. The main issue now is the speed. It takes quite a few seconds for the page to save translations. Is there any way to speed it up?

By the way, it is really difficult to translate the innocent "sighting" and "type" into Chinese. I left them out from the glossary and am still scratching my head.

[badon]

One way to speed up the page translation process is to open up multiple copies of the translation page in different tabs of your web browser. Then, you can save several pages without needing to wait for the save to finish before you move on to the next translation.

Unfortunately, the slow page saves are caused by our data integrity checks that ensure data can't be lost. There is a way a to speed that up, but it will require expensive new hardware. I'm not sure when or if that will be done any time soon, but I'm already exploring upgrade options, so I suppose it could happen any time.