Translating for Moodle

A lot of people ask them self's : How do I contribute to Open Source? Well to me this was also a question. I am not a programmer so : How do I contribute?

But answers come when you ask the question.

At our company we use Moodle for some learning stuff and I was looking at some handy modules to add to our basic install. What struck me was that there was no Dutch translation. For these blocks and Modules I was looking at. And of course I could hope for someone to arrange for a translation but as this is open source I can do it myself.

I contacted the authors and asked whether they would appraciate a Dutch translation (answer = yes) and how to do this.

How to translate for Moodle?
Moodle add-ons work with zip files. When you unzip these files there is a main directory and in this main directory there is a directory called lang.
Ofcourse there is an English translation (en_utf8) but I want to make Dutch one.

* Copy the directory and contents of en_utf8 to nl_utf8
* Enter the nl_utf8 directory and there you will find an PHP file. In my case called "block_progress.php"
* When you open this file in an editor you see all texts used by this module. eg : $string['activity'] = 'Activity';
* This string is used by the module.
* The text after the "=" (Activity) has to be translated. Which is "Activiteit".
* When done with the whole file you can send it back to the author of the module. Always ask how to send it back because not every author works on the same way.

Editors
A good editor when you are working in Windows is notepad++. On Linux and Mac you could use your standard editor.

Testing
During the translation proces it is good to test your translation. But this is stuff for a next blog

Good luck with translating.