When was the last time that was build @hans ?
Riot from F-Droid (aka without Push) uses a lot of battery, even in an empty room, we have the Gitlab pages and this forum, I don’t feel the need for yet another “medium” to track chatter.
But you’ll read Matrix messages instead… RLY?
Just ask Google to implement the language, and they do it. It isn’t worse than that.
If you also put in the work for Esperanto, there is no question it will be included.
Edit: In my opinion the greatest and most time-critical functionality to implement is recording
the latest translator of a given string, possibly the whole translator-history.
That and the comments is all the reason there is to stay behind on the likes of Transifex or Crowdin.
@kingu please, stop with “just ask Google …” 
A friend just pointed out that Occitan is not available in Andro-Oued 9 OS and I’ve noticed that they assigned Algeria indic-numbers ¿ What ? indic-number ?
The only thing that I can “just ask Google” is to stop smoking … and get outside of their office.
Depending on the OS locales excludes a lot of languages and I know people that are ready to translate apps to their language but only if the app itself includes the possibility to switch the language and not delegate to the system (Andro-Oued) to do it.
Just ask 
… about the just ask : I know people asked Google for years, please add a keyboard in our language. Google made it many years later, respecting no standard of letters disposal or layout, without any word suggestion etc
Just do, never ask
About the section comments in any translation plateform Transithing, Crowdong, Weblate, translators are not chatty, they translate and that’s all. If there was an XMPP chat on the side bar I don’t think they’ll go there, may be unless they think they can find the devs themselves live to ask them : what the heck is this strings, or can you explain me the context of this specific string.
Salutations,
Note : I used AndrOued instead of Android because Oued is just Wadi.
I’ve seen that you can configure the forum to send only emails from the Translation category. It was sending me notifications about the general activity of the whole forum.
If you think a language is dying, and playing a chicken and egg game, having neither is not a winning strategy. More translations factor into more value to be had from inclusion, and also contributes to the TM corpus.
It worked for me to ask them, on the forum that they no longer operate, but anyways.
If the issue with a keyboard being set up the wrong way, that code is available in AOSP, for which I assume patches sent are more likely to be included than patches not. If you have a resource or words that could be used for prediction, featuring a license that is acceptable, then that could work too.
@hans I noticed F-Droid/Website Posts — Norwegian Bokmål @ Hosted Weblate is sorted oldest to newest, meaning one is more likely to translate exactly the type of thing nobody sees, unless it is popular, and get to the time-critical stuff after it has been bumped down by newer posts.
As an app developer i would like if it is possible for translators to also translate the localized app description that is visible in the fdroid app store (and may be also on the app-s homepage).
My current approach is using crowdin.com and having extra debug-only stringresources (i.e. https://github.com/k3b/APhotoManager/blob/master/app/src/debug/res/values/fdroid.xml or https://github.com/k3b/APhotoManager/blob/master/app/src/debug/res/values-de/fdroid.xml)
Currently i manually convert src/debug/res/values_XX/fdroid.xml to fastlane format (i.e /fastlane/metadata/android/en-US/short_description.txt or /fastlane/metadata/android/de-DE/short_description.txt)
For details see Localized app-descriptions via translation-service Weblate, Crowdin, Stringlate,
Since the fdroid team prefers to wait for implementing a translation standard “XLIFF” instead of a simple extra convention based app/src/debug/res/values-de/fdroid.xml it would be great if the web provider has some way to also provide translation capabilities for appname, apptitle and appdescription and provide some XLIFF output thas the fdroid scanner can use as source for localized descriptions
Some statistics of my apps to see how easy-to-translate-appdescriptions help to localize descriptions (see column fdroid >= 66%)
Syncing up descriptions is a central thing that I’ll be focusing on with
this small funded project.
As for XLIFF, you don’t need to wait to use it. Just convert your
custom XML file to XLIFF. All the translation platforms support it, and
there are many tools and libraries for working with XLIFF.
The most comfortable way for app-developper and translater would be tell my translaton provider (i use crowdin) : please use app/src/main/res/values_de/strings.xml (for the app texts) plus …somewhere/fdroid.XLIFF (for the fdroid description) and let the translator do it-s job in one project
can fdroid-parser already interprete some fdroid.XLIFF for app descriptons similar to the current fastlane path convention.
I as an app developer want as few additional tools as necessary so i prefer to manually translate my fdroid.xml descriptions to fastlane format than to have to add/learn additional tools for XLIFF.
Does anybody know how translation from my by convention-fdroid.xml to fastlane format (or any other format that fdroid alreaedy supports) can be done with a gradle script?
If a gradle script can easily hadle this we just need to document it and there is no need to spend the improvement budget for this.
Greetings, I’ve been contributing to Russian translation for a while, a bit of this and that in all of the components.
I second @Licaon_Kter in his request to handle similar translations. Applications or libraries names often are not translated, so the check is failed. Probably some flag can be added to the string containing such words?
It’s pretty hard to find out who contributes to the same language. The only author mentioned in “Insights” is the last one (so it’s’ pretty often myself) and “History” range is one month. On the one hand, it’s OK since it’s pretty clear who’s active and available. On the other hand, if a component changes rarely and there’s not much going on, you lose the track. It’s possible to look for translators simply browsing string history, though. Probably it’s worth adding active translators to “Statistics”.
If I get things right (I’ve checked Weblate docs), you need to request project owners to mark you as a reviewer. In this case, they should be listed somewhere (in some config?) to get special permissions and access rights. I would like to proofread strings, along with my own translations to be proofread by someone else. It would be great having a list of reviewers for a particular language, too, and the way to request a review. Perhaps I’m missing something in Review workflow, which is already implemented.
Being able to sort strings (i.e. untranslated on top) would speed things up definitely.
As a translator I fully agree with this approach! That’s far the better solution to solve the pain to have F-Droid app descriptions in several languages => description will be done by app main translators themselves (it’s like other strings of the app).
This solution,“to add F-droid description in the app project itself”, is part of what I’ve called “an upstream” content (see my post above).
translating apps description is a pain. We must think how to initialize content with “upstreams” (Google Play description …) or we will miss one of our mission: promote FOSS.
For some apps missing this F-droid description in the project, it may be usefull to find an other automated source for F-droid app description (like stated above “Google Play Description” but it can also be the app website).
The focus of the current work is to make the process of translating the
app descriptions as part of the app development process. The end goal
is to have descriptions and translations entirely handled in each app,
and have no app descriptions or translations managed as part of F-Droid.
F-Droid would just use what the app provides.
For moving an app to this process, the tools for getting the
descriptions/translations are already there and supported by F-Droid.
Fastlane Supply. It can
fetch any test or images that are up on Google Play.
Weblate is certainly a great tool to manage translations but I also see some drawbacks compared with others.
One of them already mentioned by the Russian colleague is the lack of information about other translators participating. It seems that everyone is working in his own isolated space.
Comments normally fell on deaf ears. As there’s no notification feature to contact contributors, you won’t start a discussion about translation issues because mostly you won’t get a feedback on your comment. Actually unsatisfactory.
Weblate is lacking both an reviewer/proofreader and a voting system like it is implemented on Crowdin. So everybody can overwrite anyone and also does it which leads to considerable inconsistency.
Also already noted, the missing filter list of “untranslated strings”. Strings filtered by untranslated can only be translated step-by-step. When you have no idea how to translate a couple of strings belonging to the same theme, you cannot skip them by jumping a number of strings forward as you will loose your filter and return to “All strings” at once. Annoying.
Anyway, all this stuff is a Weblate issue not a F-Droid problem.
Translation of F-Droid’s main pages and the client to German is complete. My issues concern mainly the new baby “TWIF”:
Sporadic string updates as main issue. Established about 20 weeks ago it works as follows: TWIF deadline Thursday, published on Friday, not known, when on Weblate available. Differs between several days and many weeks, like now after summer holidays, when suddenly 4 or 5 TWIFs appear for translating. Under this circumstances a actually NEWS spreading time-critical medium cannot be translated, especially not if you consider the manpower behind the scene (in German 2 or 3 active translators).
Recurrent translations of one and the same statement at the beginning and end of each edition, sometimes slightly modified in word order, sometimes identical with some new cool formatting features. Produces work with doubtful benefit.
Recurrent translations of strings that could be used with a variable that’s replaced by a number (“This week 60 apps were updated”, “This week 8 apps were removed”…)
Added pseudo-translations by upstream marked with “for review”. Adding of translated app descriptions of a previous release may be ok but adding descriptions of totally different apps are only disturbing.
Hi,
Some answers on the Weblate part.
In Weblate you can use comments (on source and on translated strings) + it’s possible to indicate and thus use a distribution list address (see under the “Information” tab in the component, for example: F-Droid/F-Droid — French @ Hosted Weblate) + emails of contributors are visible in commits (in case you want to contact someone directly).
My point of view is that the translation tool won’t be able to organize all discussions between translators … other tools, like this forum, live chats… are welcomed depending on the project needs and contributors will.
Have you tried Weblate “Zen mode” (available at the top left corner when performing a translation)?
Concerning the lack of a voting system, as a “reviewer” I consider that reacting on a translation you have received through automatic mail notification by restoring the previous value and contacting the author is sufficient.
Hope this helps,
There’s a discussion about “needs editing” flag ambiguity going on (Weblate):
Hello @critdroid! Great to see that twif is now being translated into other languages! I’ve read the latest german translation available, and I have to say excellent job!
I agree. If you want to bring translated news in a timely manner, it would make sense to cooperate with the author of twif more closely. It just so happens that the author of twif is the same person as me, so feel free to get in touch, either through here or via matrix. (@Coffee@matrix.org). Matrix is best, as I sometimes don’t log into the forum for as long as a week.
I’m not sure how to help with this, other than making them change less often.
I try to change up the text regularly to prevent “reader fatigue”, but I can see how that is a pain for translators. Additionally, I was asked to make the footer text more compact, so I’ve been iterating on that during the last few editions.
I am not a translator myself, so it’s hard for me to understand what your needs as a translator are. I would like to work more closely with translators so we can work out what these are, help you get the translations out in a more timely manner, and generally improve the whole experience.
If you start an #fdroid-translation irc channel on Freenode, it’ll be available to Matrix users automatically, and those who don’t want to deal with Matrix can use irc.
@HenriDellal thank you! Ah, I see why I failed to find a proper component (thought it was because eating too much candies made me blind): it doesn’t have Russian language enabled, so it’s not listed in “Components” for Russian.