Dear experienced language pack maintainers, contributors and number lovers,
The question comes up occasionally when setting up new languages or when assigning new language pack maintainers. I came up with the following way to calculate the time needed to translate Moodle and would be interested in your thoughts.
I tried to calculate it from a bytes point of view, starting from English, where a byte is more or less a character.
A string contains 16 technical characters + the string Identifier. An average word is 5 strings, but string identifiers are often concatenated words so I estimated 9 characters per identifier, giving us 25 characters that don't need translating per string.
The total English language pack contains today 49122 strings (that is for a standard Moodle installation + all strings that exists for every plugin that is in the plugins database). I calculated that by choosing all in Amos and see what number it produces. The same way you can find what is in the standard installation and that comes up to 27075 strings today.
The English language pack is 12.2 MB in size, that means 12792627 Bytes in total. I got that number by downloading the language pack from https://download.moodle.org/langpack/3.7, unzip it and look at the folder size.
An average string contains 12792627 bytes / 49122 strings = 260 bytes. We don't have to translate the technicalities, so we remove 25 bytes per string, giving us 235 bytes or characters to translate per string.
27075 strings * 235 bytes per string is 6362625 bytes or characters. (With http://extraconversion.com/data-storage/kilobytes/kilobytes-to-words.html you can calculate that it is 3181312 words, which is nice to know but pointless for this calculation. Even more pointless, leaning towards discouraging is converting it to pages, using http://wordstopages.com/ which comes up with 7069 pages.)
Someone who can type well, types 180 characters per minute, so 6362625 characters / 180 characters/minute / 60 minutes/hour = 590 hours for a complete language pack, (without thinking, correcting, researching or communicating. The time involved in that is of course a lot harder to calculate and is also depending on experience, (translating - )memory, how large the group of contributors is (larger is probably more total time since more communicating) etc.
Kind regards
Koen