Help translate Lichess

Are you a native speaker of a non-english language? You can help making lichess better! No technical skills required.

Head to crowdin.com/project/lichess and start suggesting translations! You can also vote for your favourite translations.

lichess is a non-profit association, and the result of volunteer collaboration of the Internet chess community. We believe that together, we can achieve great things - for chess, for humanity, for freedom! And now we need your help, more than ever, to make lichess more accessible to everyone around the world.

Thank you all, and see you on crowdin.com/project/lichess

I would help, but I only know Pig Latin.

Something tells me that that's not going to be super useful.

@thibault I'm one of the key members of a Russian fansub team that is also absolutely open and free as lichess is. I know one can make a great translation of anything using the crowd of native speakers who suggest variants and vote for them. However, at the point I don't quite understand how is lichess team going to pick the final translation variant. You need a trusted and competent native speaker for each language who will combine the variants into one whole so that they will be accordant each with other. This is rarely the case when you just pick the most voted. Also the voting often assesses badly the variants that were suggested later, just because less people saw them.

I looked at Russian translation (not fully at the moment as it is long) and can say that variants suggested by Lichess are okay though not always the most natural. However, the crowdin description "Translated, but needs to be voted" is totally misleading cause the user-suggested translations are awful in a lot of places. (For example, the current Russian translation of Arena rules contains fact mistakes like "Последующие игры будут приносить удвоеные очки, пока вы не проиграете." which means "The following games will get you twice more points until you lose" where in fact "until you lose or draw".) We definitely need more Russian guys to suggest variants and voting.

There are also some linguistic problems connected to programming that need to be solved. These are grammatical cases and word forms for counting. The first seems to be ignored all along. Some phrases like "Played 3 Bullet games" and "Crazyhouse opening database" are hard to translate into Russian and other languages with cases in a natural way using the standard form of the word "Bullet" or "Crazyhouse". Moreover, the conrete form does depend on the construction used and is not always just adding some letters, but often altering the ending. The words form for counting are not ignored as there are "One", "Few" and "Other" forms. But what form to use depends in Russian of residue modulo 100 in a quite complicated way (I explained how exactly in the corresponding issue on crowdin) and I'm not sure this is already coded.

Also it is weird that some things are not pushed for translation at all. For example, chess variants: where can I suggest the translation for them? In Russian version of the site I also see that "Practice" and "Study" are not translated at all on the tab "LEARN" at the top whereas all other buttons are translated.

@Wolfram_EP Thank you for stepping in.

For now, we chose not to translate variant names such as Bullet, Blitz, Chess960, Crazyhouse, etc. They're like proper nouns. We might change our minds about it later on, but for now they're not supposed to be translated.

I think lichess has good support for russian pluralization, can you confirm? github.com/ornicar/lila/blob/40e2dfbb18735f3f55dd796d5f8017ea39cb8f10/modules/i18n/src/main/I18nQuantity.scala#L44-L50

However crowdin got it wrong, only allowing 3 forms, where 4 are needed. I'll see if I can fix that.

All sentences are not yet translatable, it's a work in progress, and requires developer time.

I can't seem to be able to fix Russian pluralization on crowdin. Could you please send them an email asking if they can fix it on their side? Thanks.

Well, there are three forms for usage with numbers in Russian. I can't say about other Balkan languages, but between what is called "Many" and "Other" in the code I see no difference. See explanation here, section "Plurals with numbers": http://www.russianlessons.net/lessons/lesson11_main.php Therefore I see no need to contact crowdin.

>> For now, we chose not to translate variant names such as Bullet, Blitz, Chess960, Crazyhouse, etc. They're like proper nouns. We might change our minds about it later on, but for now they're not supposed to be translated.
Well, proper nouns are usually transliterated (that is, converting Latin script to the Cyrillic script) if there is no stable or straightforward translation (but there is a stable Russian translation at least for Bullet, Blitz and Classical). I can understand the decision, but as the variant names are used not only in the list of the variants when one creates a game, but also in some sentences that are actually translated, these sentences don't seem very tidy. I would definitely handle to the native speakers of each language to determine for every variant if it should be translated or not. This is not critical though.

Ah, thank you, that helps.

I changed lichess code to match crowdin: github.com/ornicar/lila/commit/7a1cbabe5fc27e779c0ab419b3a6bd85fb2bd76b

About transliteration: yes, you're right. I now realize that, for instance, in french, we transliterate russian city names.
Do you think the word "Lichess" should be transliterated as well?

Would you like to be lichess russian translation manager on crowdin? It's quite a big responsibility, because we have thousands of russian speaking players.

Surely "Lichess" is not simply a name (in the same sense as "Bullet" or "Blitz") but also a legal brand?

I am curious what advantages transliteration of "Lichess" could offer (and curious what Chess24 and other sites do).

lol. I just did some Dutch translation today before seeing this post. That's strange. Ah well, anyways. I would love to help with more translations.

>> I now realize that, for instance, in french, we transliterate russian city names.
The analogy is partially correct, but not exactly. It is not natural to expect from a French speaker to know Cyrillic script or Chinese hieroglyphs, but it is definitely natural to expect from any human on the planet to know Latin alphabet and at least one way of possible pronounciation. This is why I say this is not critical, although the rule about transliteration is international, of course.

I think the domain name "lichess.org" should be left as is everywhere, but in the phrases like "Welcome to Lichess" I'd prefer to transliterate Lichess, so "Добро пожаловать на Личесс" or maybe "Добро пожаловать на lichess.org". I'd better google how some other sites solve this problem, however.

>> Would you like to be lichess russian translation manager on crowdin? It's quite a big responsibilities, because we have thousands of russian speaking players.
I understand the responsibilities, so firstly I will go through all the translation to estimate the size of work, then probably can accept to be a manager for some weeks or months to see how much work is added through time and after that we'll see. I can promise I take this seriously anyway, but can't promise right now that I'll have enough time for this.