[Translation] [Arabic] [PrestaShop] [PART5] [1064W] | C6

Project Details & Presentation

In this presentation, I aim for 6 main things:

1. To be as clear as possible to ease the work of the moderator.
2. To provide proper information about the current project.
3. To propose the logs of my personal work and interactions with this project.
4. To educate the readers about @utopian-io and the open-source culture.
5. To show a model of transparency and accountability toward our community.
6. To reach a bigger/larger audience of devoted Netizens.

Project Dissection:

PrestaShop is what we call in the world of the open-source development, a freemium solution. A gamer myself, I believe that most gamers out there know very well the meaning of freemium games/software. ⁽¹⁾ But this is not the case here, because we are dealing with something totally different. I personally did not know that we can pair the concept of a freemium solution/product, with an open source e-commerce. First, to make things clear, let’s start first with the official definition of this platform directly from the company itself, and the information is as the following: ⁽²⁾

“PrestaShop is an efficient and innovative e-commerce solution with all the features you need to create an online store and grow your business.”

And according to the website, this platform aims for one important thing which is “Our mission is to develop world-class eCommerce software through open source innovation. Together with our community, we provide software that enables everyone to have a successful eCommerce business”. ⁽³⁾

^{Image by V.F - The website offers a very responsive demo version for anyone who wants to play with.}

And this is exactly where things get interesting, PrestaShop does not have something really revolutionary compared to the other FOSS that I worked on. But by digging deeper, I discovered that this project has something that not all the projects I've worked on have. A big and dedicated, diversified and loyal community. The project on Crowdin has over 190k words; but still, people are competing me in finishing the translation of my own language, which I personally find very great and very encouraging.

Projects are always easier to tackle when there is a huge community around it. I am pretty sure that at the time of writing these words, strings are being pushed for my language. The sense of collectivism is really strong around this project, and I really wish all projects hade the same dedication from the PO. With approximatively 200-250k shops around the world, and used in more than 163 countries, with more than 60 languages available. ⁽⁴⁾

This platform is really a big player in the field of the eCommerce industry. PrestaShop has also more than 300 built-in features for managing the product lists, payments, shipping, manufacturers and suppliers. In addition to this, it uses a web template system that allows users to customize their stores and add new features by adding the add-ons. ⁽⁵⁾

^Credits

One other interesting thing I stated above is that the platform proposes and I quote “A Powerful Freemium Open Source Solution with International Reach”. The company is really trying all the possible capabilities and services to enhance the experience of the users/customers, and at the same time, the profitability of the stores. To find our way in this maze, I will directly quote the point of view that the company stated about this model: ⁽⁶⁾

"With its completely free solution that is available for download, PrestaShop offers endless opportunities to help merchants succeed! The company has teamed up with more than 80 industry-leading partners, such as PayPal and OVH, and offers 3,500 modules for payments, logistics, sales promotions, and more, all aimed at improving a store's features."

The Why:

The question of why will always be a question of the omnipotent nature of the virtue, genuineness, conviction, ethics, and value. Thus, I will allow myself to share the same convictions I hold most dear. Fare from the scourge, of the oblivion world!

The question of why I’m doing this project is quite hard to answer for many reasons when @utopian-io launched a call for all the moderators to write a contribution to speak about their thoughts in relation with @utopian-io and the open-source community/culture. I started to write an article for my community, and one of the few questions that I tried to answer this question “How can we; as humans, conceive doing something just for the greater good?”. A hard question to answer.

Is doing something for free a key factor in defining a true dedication for a community or an idea? or it is more like a question of values and the amount of intellect and time invested to do good? I can argue that the architecture of the world of today can lead us to see idealism as some kind of illusion, a country for the weakest, for people who can’t face reality; yet, I have always wondered why it was so difficult to apply an idealistic model of working, it must be us! which lead me to my next point.

In my time working as a language manager, I came to a few conclusions that I already pointed out in my article. One of those conclusions is that the open-source culture is not really for everyone. Thanks to the few events that happened lately, we had an idea and a distilled conclusion at the same time. The neural system of @utopian-io is highly dependent on the incentives. A huge drawback in my opinion, especially when incentives are seen as granted. Our utopian community is basically the ideal case model to study human nature and behavior. There is a clear clash between the idealistic idea that @utopian-io is trying to work with, and the realism of human emotions; which lead us to see this situation as two parallel and infinite dogmas.

Theoretically, I am quite sure that any initiative based in an open-source environment, will always have the same issues that we are having here in @utopian-io, the clash of dogmas will always be there because incentives/monetary resources are like the raw materials in these cases. I did bring @utopian-io in the presentation of this project because, in some ways, we share the same fate and destiny, we are working for the same goals; and for sure, we are paying the same price for daring to empower a semi-idealistic idea.

Well, why I’m here? I’m playing the role of the dragon's teeth (Drachenzähne) against those waves of realism! … This is just a granular contribution compared to the whole matrix of the open-source world.

Proof of Work | Brain

"In this section, you can see some kind of logs I used to print each time more information was needed to understand the functionality of some concepts/terms/words. This will also allow the reviewer and readers to clearly understand the nature of some choices that I made in some strings, and hopefully, to encourage any discussion about the betterment of the translation if needed. On top of this, I’m sure that everyone can benefit from some information printed here. I actually did learn many things, and I hope the people who are going to read this contribution will feel the same as I did … smarter! The information that I printed here must serve only as a guide to follow up my translation issues logs. If you want more information about these logs, I suggest you check the links at end of this contribution."

In the current contribution, I tried to do my best and print all the words that I faced with a clear collision, the whole was really complicated since the words that need to be used need to be uninformed now. On top of that, and since there many previous wrong or incoherent translations, the new translators will for sure have many choices from the memory translations. Working on this project can be very hazardous in a sense where the work done, and all the hard work that can be put to perfect the translation can be easily compromised by a second proofreader. I think I have amassed a decent amount of words that need to be uniformized and will try to push the post to the managers and ask them to share it with all the proofreaders that are working on this project, hoping that this will make the work easier and less tedious for all of us. Since we have in Utopian a specific way of working, if the project is 100% is completed, further work on the project by our translators will be impossible since most of the work that needs to be done will mainly be around trying to find strings with uninformed terminology to uniform them. Thus, I try to do my best to collect all the information and data that can be useful for future translators and proofreaders. I can understand that translation of an open source project can be very challenging, especially with a word count that high, but dealing with the current project did really convince me that what we doing here in DaVinci is really important and very effective. I personally like to work in a methodological way, because translating a project by following a specific methodology and with a dedicated team will for sure be reflected on the quality of the translation. Gladly, we have an ecosystem in utopian the allows such a thing, translating open source projects by incentivizing the contributors to do their best for the POs.

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I faced many concepts and word in the translation that I wanted to be sure 100% of their accuracy, the issue is that in the Arabic language there are a lot of concepts that you can basically not find, which means that people will try to find a solution by using the best approximate words possible. I tried to dig more to understand the meaning of the (Product combination) concepts. Fortunately, there are a lot of Youtube videos (in English) that did a great job on explaining the meaning of 'Product Combination' and I think that the word used in the current project fits very well the meaning. ⁽⁷⁾

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The second thing is about the word parameters, which is translated as (المعلمات) in the Arabic language, but I honestly find the word in Arabic a bit odd and really confusing. This is why I am thinking to use (بارامترات) instead, but I am really not sure about it, and hopefully, the moderator will help to make the decision to use the Arabic version of the word or just the phonetically derived word. I am also thinking to use (تحويل) or (نقل) to translate (Migrate) instead of (ترحيل) because the latter sounds illogical and a bit off-field when dealing with an internet related thing/subject. A quick other research leads me directly to find an answer for (Root directory), which will be translated from now on as (الدليل الجذر) for consistency. ⁽⁸⁾For SEO, I decided to go with (تحسين ظهور الموقع في محركات البحث), because the concept is used in most cases as a cause and not as a standalone concept, this is why it will be very odd to use the Arabic counterpart (تحسين محركات البحث) if the goal of doing the changes is to (تحسين ظهور الموقع في محركات البحث).

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There is also an issue that I faced many times, in a few strings, some words appear to be singular, but in reality, they are plural if we check on the net, and the other languages. A simple example can be found in this string, which has the word ‘Product’ appearing as singular, but in the conception of the whole text that can be found in this video, we can see that we are speaking about the products and not the product especially because of “adding messing products to the index”.

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To uniform the strings I translated, I didn’t touch the older strings to avoid them to be mixed with the current translation, after this one, I will scan all the older strings that I pushed to correct all the incoherencies that can be found. Doing so will allow me to set a baseline for my future contributions, and will make my work easier, clearer and less tedious. In addition to this, I really want the opinion of the moderator about some of the ideas that mentioned above to finalize the words that will be used from now on.

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