I'd love to help, but XOOPS is incompatible with everything known. Coordination on current language files is nearly impossible. Recommendations was made year ago, when 2.3 was latest xoops and the team leader was DJ. Now no one knows who is, is it true that Onokazu left Cube Legacy and is back here ? What's his vision about 2.6 ?
For current tree 2.5:
- Too many language files for core and 3 modules.
- Administration in language tabs separated with "# that goes for comments", J! 1.7 takes the worst points from XOOPS - and the result is clear. 1.0 was translated in over 80 languages, 1.5 in over 50 and 1.7 in few. Also there are some files that says nothing to the regular translator. This declarations should be changed by the core. Or in one file not in few. You can't put in header of most language files - ENCODING UTF-8 and in the same time to release all as ANSI. Check /language/xxxx/locale.php - too large and full of crap. this file can look like this:
;__halt_compiler();
; locale meta data
; language code, required
lang = en
; character set, default as UTF-8
charset = 'UTF-8'
; translator adapter, default as legacy
adapter = 'legacy'
; language name, default as value of lang
name = 'English UTF-8'
; is multibytes, default as 0
multibytes = 0
Clean and simple. Current one is way too worst. for 4 line declarations, 2k useless crap.
And what we talked about cleaning the code and language files out of mess. XOOPS 2.5.3 is full of deprecated strings.
/Modules/System/Language/English/Admin/Preferences.php
Line 15-21
Line 27-33
Empty declarations after each line, Define - Site Name is ok, but define Site Name Description - is empty, just remove the damn empty definition. Or you want to be more detailed like the J! 1.7 language maintainers "No Articles here means, that there is no article in category" (I don't think there are so dummy English users anyway....) Everyone knows how looks empty category or what site name means in this case. So from line 37 to the end every definition which ends with DESC is empty, better removed.
Also there are missing guidelines:
Do not translate XOOPS, jQuery, Google, AdSense, all 3rd party extension names, this is not applies to modules.
Do not use Google Translator or any other machine translation services to make your translation available.
Do not loose time to maintain ISO Translations, over 99.9% of the Hosting Providers world wide supports Unicode UTF-8 and is default encoding.
(Just examples)
Also in some languages, such as Balkans (Serbian, Bulgarian, Russian, Croatian, Macedonian, some words are too larger then they're original.
Taking the following example
Find Users in English is
Tyrsene na potrebiteli in Bulgarian and is
Baraj koristnici in Macedonian
No idea how is solved in 2.5, but in 2.3 was truncated on Tyrsene na
In 2.4 was
Tyrsene na
potrebiteli
One line message on two lines in the menu.
The whole menu is useless, all this User tasks can be done in one User menu, such as let say User Management - and there u can search, ban, add, block, rename, move from group to group.
The biggest problem still remains the reordering and maintaining language files full of crap.
The string "The %s latest registered users" is deprecated since 2.1 release, but still present in the language files. Why ? I have prepared subdomain for XOOPS localized support someday (
http://xoops.cmsbg.info/) and the default administration shows - Administrative tasks, Installed Modules and in right News from XOOPS, where do u see the old 1.3/2.0 Administration with last 10/20 registered users.
Since XOOPS differs from J! 1.7 language maintainers and category image is not counted as category avatar, why Avatars is a standalone icon since is used only for Users. XOOPS itself even don't have content module, so some of this tasks can be moved in max 5-6 global tasks.
Users
Avatars - User Management
Groups - User Management
Find Users - User Management
Mail Users - User Management
User Ranks - User Management
Users - User Management
Content
Content (missing module) - Content
Comments - Content
Smiles - Content
Image Manager - Content
Themes as word don't differs much from Templates, which is confusing. So make themes skins or move templates as part of the themes.
System
Themes - System
Maintenance (single option with shortcut ?) - System
Preferences - System
Modules - System
System Configuration (?) - System
Help
Wiki - wiki.xoops.org
Forums - forum.xoops.org
Modules - there is no such site
Developer Docs - no idea if exists.
With this changes and fights ... most of the XOOPS modules are incompatible with any existing version. Mithrandir XOOPS 2.2 uses own structure for the modules, those for 2.0 are loosing they're compatibility in 2.3, those for 2.3 no longer works on 2.5. So whole section modules - have to moved into one category Archive, and to be created new one with the compatible modules for the current tree.
And since 2.6 will come in one or another way, why not let what's left from the community to decide what to be used as Language files - INI or POT. Then one monitoring will look like this:
(Listing is for sample application)
Main list of all files -
https://www.transifex.net/projects/p/jd-i18n/Core translation progress
https://www.transifex.net/projects/p/jd-i18n/resource/admin_en-gbcom_jdownloadsini/Here anyone can see that Estonian, Portuguese and Thai translators sleeping and u can find replacement easily :)
In current tree and version, there is one Full translation (Italian, if they're add the the 2 new strings for 2.5.3), two on the way. Rest can't be counted as translation if they're for older releases and there are language changes.
I would like to see what Onokazu will say, since XOOPS 1.3 and 2.0 till some time was created and leaded by him. And to see again strong Balkans community like till 2.0.18.
(Sorry for the long reply, but everything is language related)
Btw, does this XOOPS -
https://www.transifex.net/projects/p/xoops/, have something related with XOOPS.ORG ?