The importance of Moodle translations with Koen Roggemans, Moodle Translation Coordinator.

Martin: 0:05

Hello and welcome to the Moodle Podcast.

Mary Cooch: 0:10

Hello everyone. I'm Mary Cooch, education manager at Moodle, and I'm speaking to you from the uk. I've got with me today Koen Roggemans, who's in Belgium. And we're going to talk about my two favorite things, languages, and Moodle. So Koen, thanks for joining us today and maybe you could start by telling us a bit about your background and how you got involved with Moodle.

Koen Roggemans: 0:35

Hi Mary . Thank you for inviting me for today's talk. You might be surprised, but I'm actually a science teacher by education being rather technical. I ended up IT manager for a secondary school. That's how I ended up installing, using and translating Moodle. Back in 2003 there was only a start of a Dutch Moodle translation, so that is how I ended up Moodle language back maintainer for Dutch. A year later, Martin asked me to be translation coordinator and that role I play for Moodle ever since.

Mary Cooch: 1:10

Right. Moodle

Koen Roggemans: 1:11

Really drew me into free software free as in freedom. So our school runs now nearly a hundred percent on free software. Wow. Living in Belgium gave me a lot of language exposure. In a country that's roughly 150 by 250 kilometers in size, we have Dutch , French, and German as official languages. While the media is mostly in English, languages are important in Belgium.

Mary Cooch: 1:36

Yeah, indeed. And in many other countries too, I think. So what exactly do you do for Moodle as translation coordinator?

Koen Roggemans: 1:45

Apart from maintaining the Dutch language pack , I keep an eye on the other Moodle language packs and their maintainers. I help new language pack starting up. I help language pack maintainers. I try to mediate conflicts and maintain the documentation for translators and language pack maintainers. At the moment, I'm trying to figure out which language pack maintainers are not active anymore so we can actively search for new ones . So keep an eye on the translation credit page for vacancies.

Mary Cooch: 2:15

Thanks. Yeah, that's a useful link to have there. Now you don't need to tell me this, but maybe to explain to people listening, why are translations important?

Koen Roggemans: 2:25

Moodle is an educational tool in education and for a lot of other things too. It's important to make the right way easy. Having to work or study with software in a language other than your own is just an extra step, extra unnecessary cognitive load. The emphasis should be on the learning material, not with trying to figure out how the software works. Having Moodle in your own language is just so much easier for students and teachers.

Mary Cooch: 2:52

Yeah ,

Koen Roggemans: 2:53

Since Moodle is free software as in freedom, everyone can start a language back in their own language. So there are quite a few languages for minority languages. No commercial product would spend money on having their software translated in a language. Only a few thousand people speak, but Moodle. It's possible. The only thing it takes is a person who finds it important enough to spend some time translating

Mary Cooch: 3:19

Now , um, just to stop you there, you, you talk about translating, you say translations, translators. And I wanted to clarify here for people, we're actually talking about translating the Moodle interface. So the words you see when you navigate around Moodle science and you do Moodle activities, right? So we're not talking about actual translating of content. There are content translation plugins in the Moodle plugins directory. There's a course on Moodle Academy. We are talking about the wording on the interface. So if you could tell us a bit more about how does the Moodle interface get translated, how does it work and what about the app, the Moodle app ,

Koen Roggemans: 4:00

Uh, we use an application called AMOS, which is specifically developed to translate Moodle. AMOS stands for Automated Manipulation Of Strings.

Mary Cooch: 4:11

Right.

Koen Roggemans: 4:12

And it is also the middle name of John Amos MIUs . MIUs was a bohemian teacher, a school organizer, and a great pedagogical thinker. He came up with early pedagogical principles such as learning by doing, learning from example rather than words. And most important for this talk in your own language rather than Latin. For example, how it was in the 16th century. Yeah, Amos, the software then presents us all the language strings used in Moodle together with the English wording and an empty box for the translation. Amos creates language packs , keeps track of Moodle versions, send notifications to language pack maintainers and allows everyone to help everyone is indeed everyone. The language pack maintainer is the human gatekeeper who decides what goes in the language pack and what not. After the acceptance of translation by language back maintainer, it takes only 24 hours max for every Moodle instance in the world to get the updated language back . That is slightly different for the mobile app. The mobile app is also translated using Amos, but new and modified strings only go in when a new version of the app is released. That happens a few times a year rather than daily for the mood . Moodle language banks . Mm-hmm <affirmative> . So for translators it's making sure everything is done for the mood mobile app before it's released. All that Moodle translation work is voluntary work, sometimes done by universities, Moodle partners and a lot, a lot, a lot of individuals. Moodle translation is a true community job.

Mary Cooch: 5:58

Community. Yeah. Word very close to my heart there. Now again, to clarify something you mentioned there, you mentioned language strings. So what do you mean by a language string? Exactly?

Koen Roggemans: 6:10

Yeah, the language string is a rather technical term. A language string is actually like a placeholder in the Moodle software that contains a piece of text, like the word course or dashboard or a button with the word apply, it's called a string cause that's the name for a variable set of characters in software, those characters can change, right? They're intended to change , uh, when you use a different language in the Moodle interface, a language string in Moodle can be a translatable word, it can be a sentence or even a whole help desk text, like the ones you find under the question mark. So that's the language string .

Mary Cooch: 6:53

I see. Right. Okay. So some practical , uh, examples here. What if when you are in your Moodle sites and you are using a language other than English, what if you see a typo or a grammatical error or a mistake in your language? Then also a second part of my question, what if you see uh , a mistake or similar in the original untranslated English? What can you do?

Koen Roggemans: 7:18

Well, you can help, absolutely. If you see a mistake in your language, you can search for the error in Amos. That's another place where Amos comes to help. Right? And you can propose a correction. It's done for the language pack maintainer to review, edit, or approve your work and send it to the language pack . If you have a responsive maintainer for your language pack , the mistake may well be fixed the next day on your site without having to do anything else. Then contributing the improvement. Right ? The same goes for English. There is a language pack called en underscore fix , specifically to correct mistakes in the English interface

Mary Cooch: 7:59

En fix . Right? That's very useful to know. Thanks and useful for developers too . So there's no need for them to open tracker issues or hard code anything. No , whatever . In fact, maybe just talking about developers for a a minute, something else you could comment on here. What could you say to developers and also I suppose UX designers who only speak one language, what could you say to help them understand better the potential translation issues when they're deciding on wordings for new features

Koen Roggemans: 8:32

For translators, it would be nice if the language strings for new features are well formulated , clear and error-free before the integration process. Mistakes and improvements can be made and corrected using e en fix as I previously mentioned. But for translators, it's double work . The strings that are corrected show up as outdated and have to be reviewed. That has to be done in over a hundred languages. So one small mistake and a hundred volunteers have to review it. Translation starts immediately after the integration process of a new feature. Another problem for translators is that English is a very condensed language. A lot of languages take up more screen space to say the same thing. That's what I mean. Yeah. So we need a lot of space on buttons, startles, et cetera , to make less condensed languages look nice too.

Mary Cooch: 9:24

You said over a hundred languages that that is a lot of languages and, and a lot of space that I understand about that. I know there is some languages, inflected languages, they change their endings and then can sometimes get quite long words, whereas English doesn't. Anyway. Finally, let , let's send on a nice thing. Whatcha you happy about with your work that you've been doing over the last few years? What keeps you happy?

Koen Roggemans: 9:48

I compared the figures of , uh, translated strings with the previous interview I've done six years ago. Right. And the number of strings doubled in that six years to over two and a half million translated strings . Wow. We have around 400 language pack maintainers. Those are people that voluntary take care of the Moodle language in their language, spending their time in favor of education, in their language, their efforts make it possible for anyone in the world to enjoy a translated Moodle site . I find that really great.

Mary Cooch: 10:21

Yeah, I do too. That is indeed great. And it really demonstrates well the power of the community. So thanks so much for speaking to us today, Koen and , and thanks for telling us all about language string translation in Moodle. And thanks to everyone for listening.

Koen Roggemans: 10:37

Thank you .