2.1 KiB
Translations
Translations are solicited on Transifex[https://www.transifex.com/]. We upload our source language (US English) to Transifex, where our translators can submit their translations. Before the app is released, we pull their latest work into the code base.
Fetch
You should always fetch the latest translations before pushing new source translations, as any newly updated source strings will blow away the existing translated strings. Generally when a source string is updated, it's preferred to have the previous translation vs an english string.
To fetch the latest translations:
bin/pull-translations
This imposes some limits on what localizations we include. For example, we don't want to include languages until a substantial portion of the app has been translated.
Managing Source Strings
There is currently no automated way to extract our localized strings. Instead developers keep our source strings file up to date manually as we change strings in the code base.
Be sure to add a comment to provide context to the translators. For example:
/* Tab button label which takes you to view all your archived conversations */
ARCHIVE_HEADER="Archive"
/* Button label to archive the current conversation */
ARCHIVE_ACTION="Archive"
Why comment? For example, in English these are the same, but in (e.g.) Finnish the noun/verb are distinct.
/* Tab button label which takes you to view all your archived conversations */
ARCHIVE_HEADER="Arkisto"
/* Button label to archive the current conversation */
ARCHIVE_ACTION="Arkistoi"
Context should also provide a hint as to how much text should be provided. For example, is it an alert title, which can be a few words, a button, which must be very short, or an alert message, which can be a little longer?
Upload
Make new source strings available to our translators by uploading them to transifex. Make sure you've fetched the latest translations first, otherwise you could overwrite some useful translations on Transifex.
tx push --source