Re: Translations for schema.org?

Within the project translation space, one of the projects I have admired is
the WordPress community, and how they have architected their translation
process. My inspirational take away from how they structured their
multilingual project (using .po files) is that with each software release
the translations are also versioned to match the core software release.
This allows for independent progress between the main/core and local
(translations) files. Core can progress incrementally and then one can look
at ES or DE and see when they were last in sync. It might be that all the
new additions since a particular release were in a section of schema which
is not particularly relevant (e.g. bio, or bib).

It might be the case that only two or three rdfs:comment objects are
updated in a versioned release (aside from totally new additions). One
advantage with this approach I have found is that much of the work can be
automated. By automation I mean the connection to translation volunteers.
So, if an rdfs:comment gets updated then all the contributors across all
the local files can be notified that their translation should be reviewed.
Looking across the elements is different from looking down the language
based columns. There may be a pool of translators who might contribute to a
particular language file. These can be contacted with each new release for
just the new elements in that release. Working both horizontally across
elements/types/attributes and  vertically across languages can help make
more efficient use of volunteers.

all the best,
- Hugh

On Tue, Nov 9, 2021 at 3:20 PM Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com> wrote:

>
> Thanks, everyone for your enthusiasm on this. The Web is worldwide, and it
> would be good to reflect that by having translations on the site.
>
> As Richard points out there are 2300+ term definitions already in the
> system. And more to come, as well as many in need of improvement,
> clarification and fixes. And this is without considering our examples and
> other supporting materials.
>
> What I suggest is that I investigate having Google pay for a
> commercially-done bulk translation of whatever we here agree upon. The
> translation texts would be donated back to the project and continue to be
> managed at Schema.org. The results will not be perfect but it would be a
> good starting point. I imagine the translation effort would also draw
> additional attention to definitions which are ambiguous or confusing.
>
> For an example - Google's webmaster-facing documentation on our various
> schema.org-using product features is translated into other languages.
>
> So we have
> https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/factcheck
> and nearby - with a "language switcher" option in the top-right (or
> top-left I guess sometimes).
>
> (there seems to be an URL structure to point to translations too,
> https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/article?hl=es
> )
>
>
>
> https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/article?hl=es#article-types
> "Article objects must be based on one of the following schema.org types:
> Article <https://schema.org/Article>, NewsArticle
> <https://schema.org/NewsArticle>, BlogPosting
> <https://schema.org/BlogPosting>."
>
>
> https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/article?hl=es#article-types
> Los objetos Article deben basarse en uno de los siguientes tipos de
> schema.org:Article <https://schema.org/Article>, NewsArticle
> <https://schema.org/NewsArticle> o BlogPosting
> <https://schema.org/BlogPosting>
> Los objetos Article deben estar basados en uno de los siguientes tipos de
> schema.org...
>
> Objek Article harus didasarkan pada salah satu jenis schema.org berikut:
> Article <https://schema.org/Article>, NewsArticle
> <https://schema.org/NewsArticle>, BlogPosting
> <https://schema.org/BlogPosting>
> Artikelobjekte müssen auf einem der folgenden Schema.org-Typen basieren ...
> Les objets "Article" doivent être basés sur l'un des types schema.org
> suivants...
> Gli oggetti Article devono essere basati su uno dei seguenti tipi
> schema.org...
> Obiekty Article muszą być oparte na jednym z tych typów schema.org...
> Os objetos "Article" precisam se basear em um dos seguintes tipos de
> schema.org ...
> Các đối tượng bài viết phải dựa trên một trong các loại sau trên
> schema.org...
>
> etc etc etc., just to give a flavour of the kinds of schema.org-related
> text we've been translating at Google.
>
> If folks don't think it's a terrible idea, I'll dig around whether we can
> make this happen with Google's assistance and funding. My hope is that by
> getting the bulk of the work done as a commercial task we can focus our
> community expertise and collaboration on the core business of having good
> clear definitions for everything. In cases where the translating doesn't go
> well, we can take that as a signal to clean up the definitions.
>
> What do folks think?
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
> p.s. with regard to controlled English and simple English variants I think
> they are great as inspirations but it isn't clear that they'll necessarily
> be a usability improvement. We could make some experiments though!
>
>
>