OpenX Blog

Now that we have released 2.7 beta, it is time to kick our translations efforts into high gear. In the past month, we have completed 6 new languages. In the next week, I am hoping that we can complete all the languages that are more than 50% complete:

• Danish
• Dutch
• Italian
• Japanese
• Lithuanian
• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Portuguese (Portugal)
• Romanian
• Russian

As you may have heard, there is a lot riding on this - we are giving away Official OpenX Translator T-shirts, some blog love, and other goodies (perhaps, to a lucky winner, The Amazing OpenX!)

The OpenX community is truly international, and we really want our product to reflect our global status.

So - get to work!

More than 100 members of the OpenX community have translated OpenX Ad Server into many different languages over the years. For our newest beta version, v2.7, we currently have 41 languages being translated.

We really would like to step up our efforts now, since OpenX v2.7 beta is right around the corner. The 41 languages are on average 40% complete. Let’s see how many languages we can make available in OpenX 2.7!

If you would like to become a translator for OpenX Ad Server, would like to become a hero of your language community within OpenX, and would like to have official recognition on our site and forum, not to mention an official OpenX Translator T-Shirt, please do sign up and start translating!

The complete translation of the 2.5 beta into 11 languages has been contributed by our community. We have had many volunteers step up and accept the challenge of translating it into their native tongues. They turned out to be the right people for the job too! We all owe them our thanks for their fantastic work!

Please meet:

• Aby, Daniel, Ernesto (Spanish)
• Benjy (French)
• Heiko (German)
• Max, Damir (Russian)
• Rafael, Paulo (Brazilian Portuguese)
• Ling, Scourgen (Chinese Simplified)
• Luca, Pierluigi (Italian)
• Aleš (Slovenian)
• Marius (Romanian)
• Norio, Tomoaki, Kenji (Japanese)
• Krzysztof (Polish)

These guys refused to get intimidated by the massive number of words (over 9,000!) and sped through the task. The award for the fastest translator would have to go to Marius and Aleš who had to start from scratch yet progressed at incredible pace, sometimes reaching 20% a day. Then there are those like Norio, Luca and Pierluigi who mysteriously committed translations at some extraordinary hours, and those who got involved last minute, like Daniel, Ernesto and Paulo, yet gave it all they had. Finally, our thanks go to those who have been part of the translation team for a long time and who we can always rely on: Aby, Benjy, Heiko, Max, Rafael, Ling, Scourgen, and Krzysztof. Well done guys!

Special thanks to all of those translators who have put in so much effort to complete these language updates. They worked hard to make it happen and we hope you will benefit from this.

And we have more good stuff to come your way! More and more volunteers get involved into our localisation project. We have volunteers working on Lithuanian, Danish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Arabic and many more. If you feel you want to join and contribute please register here and we will get in touch.

Thank you guys!

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Related links:
Check out our translation progress.

The OpenX team has released an update to the beta version of the OpenX ad server.

This release (v2.5.70 beta) introduces bug fixes and incorporates some significant updates to translations. We’ve updated 11 languages with a full set of translation strings for the 2.5 beta, including:

• Brazilian Portuguese
• French
• German
• Italian
• Japanese
• Polish
• Romanian
• Russian
• Simplified Chinese
• Slovenian
• Spanish

Special thanks to all our community translators who have put in so much effort to complete these language updates and to all the other translators busily working on other language updates.

See the release notes for more details or download the latest OpenX beta today!

We have released an update for the stable version of OpenX. OpenX (v2.4.4) contains bug fixes, performance enhancements and a new colour scheme to match the new OpenX brand.

But wait, there’s more! Don’t worry, it’s not a box opener but something even better… big improvements to our translation files.

As you may be aware, some of our translation files date back years. The quality of each translation varied, most were incomplete and some completely broken. We’ve been working with community members to update key translation files. Our work has focused on the upcoming beta release but we were able to backport some significant enhancements to our current stable release for your enjoyment.

Before this release, key translation files were a mess:

1. Simplified Chinese was completely broken
2. Russian was unusable for most publishers
3. Brazilian Portuguese needed to be restarted from scratch
4. Spanish and French were only partially complete
5. Even German, our best translation, needed some work!

All of these languages are dramatically improved. We know these aren’t perfect but they are largely complete with the exceptions of some hard coded strings in the application.

The next stable release of OpenX will have even better translations for more languages. We’d love your help to make this happen. Please contact us if you would like to assist us with the ongoing internationalisation work.

(By the way, we’ve repackaged this release as publishers were unable to unpack the archive cleanly on their windows desktops – damn you pesky case insensitive file system! Our apologies for any inconvenience this caused.)

Find out more in the release notes or download the latest release of OpenX today.

Thanks to everyone who has stepped forward to help with the Openads internationalization work so far.

We’d like to introduce and publicly thank Heiko, Tyler, Rafael, Max, Sébastien, Aby and Sebastian who are making great progress translating the Openads application into 5 languages.

Great job guys! It has been a pleasure to work with you and we are very grateful. Don’t stop - we still need you!

Having 5 complete language translations will be a great step forward, but we’ve got a lot more work to do. Many languages still need to be covered and we are constantly looking for volunteers. If you would like to share your expertise with others and make Openads more accessible to your language speakers let us know.

Help us make it happen. Register here to help with our translation efforts.

Speaking of translations - what tools have people used in other projects to help translators manage the task of keeping their translations up to date with changes in the master language?

Clearly, the current system used in Openads (simple text files) isn’t that great, and I’d like to see us move to something more advanced. What have people used before that has worked well, or worked poorly?

We’re working hard to make Openads bigger and better than ever. Part of our short term strategy is getting Openads translated into as many languages as possible and we want your help!

Would you be interested in translating the Openads website, product or documentation into your native language?

One of the options we’re exploring is the possibility of a translation wiki – Would you use a tool like this? Is this something that you’d like to see on Openads?

The team would love to hear your thoughts on this – Post a comment or email us (hello at openads dot org)

[Note: See also Andrew's posting about translation tools]

[Note: See this post about and get involved in our translation project]