Status of Translations

Last updated on 2022-06-21 | Edit this page

Estimated time 32 minutes

Overview

Questions

  • What is the current status of translations in R?
  • How can you find out more about the translations in your language of interest?

Objectives

  • Demonstrate the current status of translations in R
  • Explore the Process for Localization (Translation) in R
  • Explore mirror of R source code
  • Introduction to .pot and .po files.

Introduction

There are two basic files with extensions .pot and .po that are usually required during the Translation process in R. The .pot files are the template files which contain the error messages, warnings, and other similar messages, in R. In the template .pot file these messages will be available in standard English against the placeholder msgid "Standard English message is placed here". Below every msgid there will be a placeholder for the translated message called msgstr "" and it would always be empty (default) in the .pot file. The msgstr is to be filled in the corresponding .po file - to include the appropriate translation. Both the template .pot file and the translated .po file should stored in the same directory always.

Challenge 1: Exploration

Go through the dataset and example script available in the translations directory. Explore the status of translations.

There are three datasets available to use with this lesson: metadata.CSV, message_status.csv, and 4168b6fff27eafad68a4b134dba5c7d09e090fcb.csv. Each of these datasets are described below:

  • The metadata.csv data file includes a .csv with one record per .po file in the R sources. There are 12 variables included in this dataset. The variable names and their description are provided in the table below:
Variable name Description
sha The shortened SHA for the git commit of the r-svn repo that the data were obtained from
date The date of the git commit of the r-svn repo that the data were obtained from
package The name of a package containing messages to be translated
po_file The name of .po files in the package sources
component The component of the package the .po file relates to, either C, R, RGui (the latter is only in the base package)
language The name of the language in English with the region as a suffix if applicable (e.g. English_GB vs English)
r_version The name of the R version to .po file relates do (does not always match pot_creation_date)
bug_reports Where to report bugs related to this .po file
pot_creation_date The date the PO template file was created (when messages last updated), YYYY-MM-DD format
po_revision_date The date the .po file was revised, YYYY-MM-DD format
last_translator The name and email of the last translator
team The name and/or email of the translation team
  • The message_status.csv data file includes a .csv with one record per message in each .po file in the R source. It includes the variables sha, date, package, po_file, component, and language as above, plus:
Variable name Description
message A message in the .po file
translated A logical value indicating if the message has been translated
fuzzy A logical value indicating if the translation is flagged as fuzzy, i.e. a fuzzy match of an old translation to a message that has had a minor update
  • The 4168b6fff27eafad68a4b134dba5c7d09e090fcb.csv data file contains the results for the r-svn commit with hash 4168b6fff27eafad68a4b134dba5c7d09e090fcb. This .csv has 6 columns described below:
Variable name Description
git_commit The commit hash
package The name of a package in the R sources
language The ISO 639 code of the language, including variant
type Either “C” or “R”
n_translated The number of correctly translated messages
n_untranslated The number of incorrectly translated messages

Using the information available in the message_status.csv data file, a bar plot is created which shows the counts of correctly translated messages from the C or R code. The code used to generate this bar plot and the bar plot are provided below.

R 

# Load required packages
library(dplyr)

OUTPUT 


Attaching package: 'dplyr'

OUTPUT 

The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':

    filter, lag

OUTPUT 

The following objects are masked from 'package:base':

    intersect, setdiff, setequal, union

R 

library(forcats)
library(ggplot2)
library(readr)

# Read the data set
message_status <- read.csv("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/r-devel/rcontribution/main/collaboration_campfires/translations/message_status.csv")

# Plot the counts
ggplot2::ggplot(filter(message_status, translated, !fuzzy, component != "RGui"),
      aes(x = fct_infreq(language))) +
      geom_bar(stat = "count", fill = "steelblue") +
      theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, vjust = 0.5, hjust = 1),
            legend.position = "none") +
      labs(x = NULL, y = "# translated messages")
Correctly translated messages in base and default packages
Correctly translated messages in base and default packages

Challenge 2: Propose new metrics and plots

Using the datasets and the example code above, analyse the current state of translations in the R project, for the language(s) of your interest. Propose metrics, tables of plots to explore the translations data. You can modify the code above to produce the metrics, tables or plots.

Datasets available on the r-devel/rcontribution GitHub repository.