Hi guys. I’m a Linux (and open source) enthusiast from Thailand, and also a bilingual. I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of missing translations and potentially awkward ones even in the latest release of GNOME, but the i18n system is very confusing to be. There’s the mailing list, whatever this guide is supposed to be, and IRC channels. Problem is, there’s nothing that directly tells me how exactly to e.g. fix that one weird translation in the shell.
It’s very confusing to a non-professional like me, so I figured I should ask about it here.
Which mailing list are you referring to and where did you see a link to it? The general GNOME mailing list have been decommissioned in favour of this Discourse forum and there shouldn’t be any reference left to them. The Thai team still has its own mailing list, outside of the GNOME infrastructure, for team/language specific communication.
The guide is still the guide for now. I don’t know what you mean by “whatever this is supposed to be”. This is the equivalent of saying that something doesn’t work, but not telling us what problem you are actually facing.
GNOME doesn’t use IRC anymore and, again, there shouldn’t be any reference left to it. If you find one, please tell us where so we can fix it.
Go to Damned Lies and create an account. Find the relevant team, click on the Join button. The team has a webpage that most likely contains information you should familiarize yourself with (e.g. typographic conventions, choice of words…).
Then you can find the gnome-shell module (in GNOME 47 for instance), Reserve the module for translation, download the po file, open it in appropriate software (like GNOME Translation Editor), update it, save it, then upload it on the website using the Upload action, so that it is marked as translated. A reviewer will then have a look, give you feedback if needed, and eventually commit it.
If anything else is unclear, don’t be afraid to ask, but please be precise.
It just feels very convoluted for a newcomer like me.
This page is the biggest offender for me. It presents information in a way that tells you to join the i18n mailing list, the GTP IRC, doc mailing list, etc. and I don’t even know which one is even essential for a newcomer. It’s a very verbose information overload.