Hi Richard,
If there is no activity after you make a commit, 'll contact him to see what's up. When you make a commit, the language pack maintainer will get an email notification (and after a week really regularly ).
Language pack maintaining is a volunteer job and peoples life changes.
Anyway, your work is never lost - if necessary, we'll find someone else.
Please get in touch if there is a problem.
Kind regards
Koen
Thank you, Koen.
I can save a lot of time manually copy-pasting if I can start by copying the entire ja translation file to ja_kids, since all the admin strings can stay as-is. Then I'll go through the strings that users read and simplify them.
Sorry for the newbie question: How do I do that?
You don't
The jp_kids is a child language of jp. That means that all the strings that it contains only the modified strings from jp.
This makes maintenance in the long run a lot easier: think of 1000 - 1500 new modified strings per Moodle version, twice a year. Most of those strings are not user interface strings and would not need any change for the jp_kids language pack.
I suggest to use the search capabilities on https://lang.moodle.org to identify what really needs modifying and only change that.
A lot will come with using the language pack too. If you see something you don't like, you change it in the kids language pack. Your site by default updates language packs every day, so the next day your changes are life for everyone...
This page: https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Translation_priority gives you some clues of what is interesting to work on and what not.
A typical kids language pack contains a few hundred modifications, with Hebrew kids as a top of 1200 modifications. That's far from the 20000+ strings a language pack contains.