Cucumis - News

Happy new year 2006!

Happy new year 2006 to all cucumis.org visitors

What has changed since the last news entry?

- Cucumis.org has grown fast as there are now more than 1900 members and about 20 new members a day. Many new languages have been added to the cucumis.org interface: Chinese, Hebrew, Swedish, and Brazilian Portuguese. A big thanks to the cucumis.org members who translated it.

- The project section is up and running but nobody knows how it works . It's mainly dedicated to webmasters who want to translate their websites. They can submit their text to be translated on cucumis.org and invite their visitors to translate on cucumis.org. Cucumis.org will get new members and the webmasters will be able to use the translation engine of cucumis.org and the expertise of cucumis.org members.

- An affiliation program has been developed to reward those who put a link on their personal websites or blogs to talk about cucumis.org. Instead of using the http://www.cucumis.org/ classic url, you can use this url: [linkid=w_in_[userid]]. Each translation done by a member you sent on cucumis.org through this url, will earn you additional points (5 percent of the translation cost). There is also a similar affiliation link for the webmasters who manage a project on cucumis.org, to invite their visitors to translate their website on cucumis.org, with the same advantages: https://www.cucumis.org/translation_53_w/p_in_myProjectId.html.

- The multi-language Babylon dictionary has been inserted on the translation pages at the bottom of the side menu. It's a very useful tool and it's not intrusive at all.

- The wiki engine has been set. Some parts of the cucumis.org interface, as well as details and tutorials about how the website should be used, are now embedded in wiki articles. Wiki articles are more flexible than the language files of the cucumis.org interface, as they can be edited at any time by any member. The wiki articles of the cucumis.org interface can also be translated from the translation homepage using the link "List of [wiki] translations to be done or updated".

- It's now possible to post comments on all parts of the website, including news and wiki articles.

What's next?

- A language course section is currently under development. Each member of cucumis.org will be able to create a wiki lesson about his favorite language.

- A java applet is under development to offer the possibility to record and play back audio samples for the language courses.

- A java or flash applet will be developed to draw illustrations for the language courses.

- I don't understand why the ratio of members having done at least one translation is so small... Maybe I should try to improve the interface and I need your feed back on this...

Nepali, Romanian, Italian, Bulgarian, Arabic and Portuguese

Six new languages for the user interface of cucumis.org!
Thanks to:
- jaH who has translated offline the nepali files.
- aelred and lorelai for the romanian version.
- carla1604, Witchy and Lele for the italian version.
- hollowman and vyras for the bulgarian version.
- marhaban for the arabic version.
- Papai Noel and arkangath for the portuguese version.

I apologize in advance for any people I have forgotten to include.

Coming next:
- I'm still developing the "Project" section but I lack free time these days.
- I'm also thinking about developing a tiny wiki engine for the help section and maybe for a "Learn" section coming in a few months...

The forum is opened

Hello all, and thanks for your support. The translation of the user interface is progressing fast, Spanish, Esperanto and Russian are already online. Greek, Hebrew and Romanian are nearly completed. Swedish, Chinese (simplified), Nepali and Arabic are progressing nicely.

The Cucumis.org engine is now nearly ready. I had a dream to build a huge community of translators to help interesting and useful multilanguage projects. In fact, Cucumis still needs to find its way and its users. We really need your feedback and your thoughts. The forum is now running and is waiting for your ideas.

Three new languages

About five days passed since the last news update and Cucumis.org is now implemented in three new languages:
- Turkish translated for the most part by zort and helped by my old friend shanice.
- Catalan translated in only one day by the translation dream team: strip and Ereza.
- Japanese translated by ccdj and helped by Try.

That seems so easy to say, but it means a lot of work and I thank you all for the trust you placed in Cucumis.org.
We are now ready to welcome Mr. Googlebot but he seems to be a little shy...

Languages coming soon : Spanish (90% completed), Esperanto (85%), Russian (50%) and Greek (50%).

First news, good news!

Cucumis have been online for 3 days, and I'm glad that almost everybody seems to like it!

First of all I want to thank Aleid from the Netherlands, who has been a great help on improving the english texts and translating the whole website into dutch, with the help of HB10.
Secondly, the german team leaded by Rumo, mare76 and leBleu, has completed the translation of cucumis.org in 3 days. Thanks to all of them! Turkish, greek, spanish, polish and chinese teams are progressing fast too.

One of the problem detected by Rumo is the english "you" which can have different meanings. It's corresponding on cucumis.org to the formal and singular "you".
I noticed too a recurrent problem with the punctuation. When a sentence to be translated is not ending with a point, you may not add a point in the corresponding translation. I know all sentences should end with a point but for websites, we need sometime to join texts together, and a point would disturb.

Coming soon :
- Possibility to send personal messages to registered users
- Start discusions on each translation
- A FAQ for the Help section