Translating Storefront – questions

Please post the questions here, I’m certainly no expert in translating so might be useful to have the community responses.

Hi James, and community,

so I made a translation for Storefront in Finnish. I’m just unsure what to do with strings with WooThemes commercial extensions advertisements.

WooThemes does not provide support in Finnish, nor are the extensions translated, so it just don’t make sense to try to sell WooThemes commercial products to Finnish audience, in Finnish. This is just not fair, as it provides users with wrong expectations.

It seems this is going to be a case between WooThemes marketing department and hired translators, not volunteering translators.

What do you think?
I’m open to suggestions.

Hey,

Yep, this is a problem that has been around since premium closed-source themes/plugins became a thing.

I’d suggest creating a project on Transifex and managing it yourself. It’s tricky because with our repositories being private we cannot have the .pot file automatically update. There’s some manual tasks involved that we struggle to find time for.

I agree localisation is very important, but it’s one thing we really rely on the community for.

Cheers

James,

you’ve done such a great work with this theme!

I’m always happy to be able to contribute to a free WordPress theme as a translator.

Translating WooThemes commercials is different and goes beyond my ethics, though.

Your suggestion creating a project and maintaining it myself is totally out of question.

Loacalization sure is important for marketing, but does WooThemes really expect/rely on contributing translators do the marketing in several languages, globally? How’s about hiring translators for commercials?

Is this planned Woo marketing strategy?

It would be another case if WooThemes distributed Storefront @ woothemes.com, but we’re on www.ads-software.com.

I would suggest you pull those commercials off from localization, or just advice volunteering translators to not translate commercial strings of the theme, as there is no support/extensions in target language.

I just added ‘(englanninkielisi?, maksullisia)’, that’s ‘(in English, commercial)’ after the string “Enhance your site” to avoid misleading.

I may be totally wrong, so a second opinion from community is needed, hence, tagged modlook.

Again, thank you for creating Storefront, the Free WordPress Theme!

Tagging Modlook, just means you get a now slightly grumpy moderator to stare at a thread for 5 minutes wondering why they were summoned.

It should be added when in your opinion a forum moderator needs to take action on a post or thread. This would be when private information such as email addresses, phone numbers, login information or other personal information has been posted. A moderator can then edit the post to remove that information.

Using this tag to try and get quicker help will not work.

https://make.www.ads-software.com/support/handbook/contributing-to-the-wordpress-forums/modlook-and-tagging/#when-to-tag-a-post-with-modlook

It is not their for providing second opinions. Many moderators including myself monitor the modlook tag by RSS and get instant notifications, meaning you are also disturbing what ever else we were doing on our Sunday morning.

Tim,

I’m so sorry disturbing you this Sunday morning. I really am.
Didn’t know about the instant notifications waking you up or whatever.

It’s just that in my opinion a forum moderator needs to take action on this thread. I’m just trying to learn things, what is right and wrong, the ethics of contributing…
Feels I’m alone with this case. Please say I’m not.

James,

after consulting my trusted friend, a mentor and opensource guru, I finally realized that creating and maintaining open source projects isn’t free. It takes lots of expensive hours.

It’s very hard to find community resources on these things.

So, I will contribute to Storefront translating the commercial strings also, if it helps your well earned salary to be paid.

I would still include a mention that commercial extensions are in English only.

Next step could be translating those extensions.

All good?

Friends?

Hey, thanks for understanding. We’d love to hire people to translate all of our products into all languages but, there’s a lot of languages… it’s not really feasible.

Remember that the commercial extensions are translatable. So while we don’t necessarily supply the translations, after installing a plugin like Codestyling Localization it’s easy for someone to translate an extension into their native language. Of course it’s up to them whether they share that or not.