This is the fourth progress report related to my work on the CONSUL app.

In order to avoid plagiarizing myself, please find all relevant information about the project in my first entry. You can also check out the whole project on GitHub.

I started working on CONSUL a couple of months ago. After my third report, I was sidetracked by an update on the Byteball.org project, which was rather urgent, and later went on holiday and came back as Language Moderator for the Italian team. As I now have to give precedence to reviewing my Translators’ contributions, my own work on CONSUL will proceed more slowly, but I’m happy that I’m able to continue on with this project, which I’ve found both interesting and stimulating.

Upon returning to CONSUL, I chose to start off by concentrating on a single file: admin.ylm. This turned out to be both simple and challenging, so much that I will actually need two reports to cover it all. It sounds like an oxymoron, I know, but I’ll explain myself right away.

The strings collected in the admin.ylm file are all very simple, at least at first glance: single common words, often repeated, or short repetitive sentences, all pertaining to the settings and tools available to administrators in order to manage their City’s CONSUL. This apparent simplicity poses nevertheless its own issues, which mainly stem from the fact that English has a very easy going approach to grammar, which gets more complicated when transitioning to Latin languages.
Unfortunately, the manager for the Crowdin translation project doesn’t seem to be very responsive, and other languages solved these issues in different ways. I therefore had to work out my own solutions.

Declination of gender for adjectives

In English, nouns and adjectives are generally neutral while in most other European languages (including Italian) each noun is either feminine or masculine and adjectives must be declined accordingly. When translating full sentences this is not usually an issue, because the noun dictating gender should be explicit, but when a string is a single adjective there’s no clue as to whether a feminine or masculine translation is more appropriate.
Since most of these adjectives seemed to belong to search filters options, I chose to decline them according to the parent directory the string belonged to. So if I was in the “proposal” directory (which translates to proposta, f.) and had to translate “approved” I opted for the feminine approvata, while when I translated “completed” in the “budget” directory (bilancio, m.) I went with the masculine completato. I hope I got them right!

Verb tense for instructions

When you’re posting on SteemIt and see the “Post” button, or “Edit” or “Comment”, what form do you think those verbs display? Basic infinitive or imperative? First or second person? Singular or plural? In English it doesn’t really matter, because it’s all the same unless the verb in in a past tense or in third person. In Italian, each of these forms are different and give off a slightly different meaning.
Much like on SteemIt, I went the imperative way and consistently translated those verbs as Pubblica, Modifica, or Commenta rather than in the infinitive forms Publicare, Modificare, or Commentare. I figured the important thing wasn’t really the choice between one option or the other but, rather, being consistent once I’d chosen and stick with that format throughout.

Another issue I had pertained to a few key words used throughout the file with regards to the voting process for participatory budget and spending proposals. I’ll go over that in my next report.

Please refer to my application for my expertise and experience as a translator.

As I mentioned, this file had very little code, therefore the clean words count shouldn’t be significantly lower than the gross count. I therefore chose not to fill up a companion clean words text file, since it would have simply encumbered the translation process with no real advantage to this report.

Please find the CrowdIn project at this link, where the activity feed summarizes my contribution.