Localized app-descriptions via translation-service Weblate, Crowdin, Stringlate,

k3b · November 20, 2017, 5:56pm

Summary (In Gherkin notation)

In order to make it as easy as possible to localiize (translate) an app description for F-Droid App Store
As an Android App Translator
I Want to use the same tools that are used to translate the app itself: Weblate, Crowdin, Stringlate, …

Epic:

I want to be able to maintain the localized app descriptions as described in All About Descriptions, Graphics, and Screenshots | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
through a tranlationservice (i am using crowdin.com and Stringlate app ). The result in fastlane project layout would look like this:

MyProjectRoot/fastlane/metadata/android/en-US/title.txt
MyProjectRoot/fastlane/metadata/android/en-US/full_description.txt
MyProjectRoot/fastlane/metadata/android/en-US/short_description.txt
… same for /de-DE/ and other locales

Since most tranlationservices already can handle android-string-resources (values.xml-format)
i have added debug-only string resource under `MyProjectRoot/app/src/debug/res/values(-xx)/fdroid.xml like this (i.e. values/fdroid.xml and values-de/fdroid.xml):

<resources>
	<!-- This becomes .../fastlane/metadata/android/short_description.txt.
		See https://f-droid.org/docs/Build_Metadata_Reference/#Summary -->
	<string name="short_description">Hello World Deluxe: get a free greeting every time you start the app.</string>
	<string name="title">Hello World Deluxe</string>
	<string name="full_description"><![CDATA["..."]]></string>
</resources>

note: ordenary stringresources are in MyProjectRoot/app/src/main/res/values
note: debug-only string resource will not go into a release build.
note: title.txt, short_description.txt, full_description.txt can be easily manually created from fdroid.xml.

What do you think of this approach?
Are there other already established standards to handle localized app-descriptions via translation-service?
Would it be difficuilt to include this translation-friendly-convention into the app-buildprocess?

hans · November 22, 2017, 11:58am

I think the standard format should be XLIFF since that’s a translation format. Android Strings XML is not a great format for translations. For more on this, see support Google Play upload tools: Fastlane and Triple-T Gradle Play Publisher · Issue #1525 · WeblateOrg/weblate · GitHub

hans · February 26, 2019, 1:01pm

This is now possible in Weblate using Fastlane/Triple-T files, for example:

Here’s the full story on how it got implemented:

github.com/WeblateOrg/weblate

support Google Play upload tools: Fastlane and Triple-T Gradle Play Publisher

opened 02:03PM - 19 Jun 17 UTC

closed 10:04AM - 24 Feb 19 UTC

eighthave

enhancement translate-toolkit

There are two major tools for managing the localized files for Google Play: Fas…tlane Supply and Triple-T Gradle Play Publisher. F-Droid also supports the same file/dir structure. If Weblate would directly support those files, then there would be a clean, simple, automated way to translate Android apps using Weblate. Here's the ideal workflow: 1. Weblate pulls source from git 2. translators work in Weblate 3. translations get pulled into app's source directly where Fastlane or Triple-T expect them 4. F-Droid automatically uses those translations from git 5. those translations are directly published to Google Play via the respective tool (Fastlane Supply or Gradle) Both Fastlane and Triple-T use plain text for the source and translation file format. _title_ and _short_description_ would be easy to support directly as plain text, _changelog_ and _full_description_ much less so: * _title_: 30 char limit, one line, plain text * _short_description_: 80 char limit, one line, plain text * _full_description_: 4000 char limit, multiple lines, can contain basic HTML * _changelog_: 500 char limit, multiple lines, plain text But perhaps this setup is just too different from standard translation workflows that assume strings are in a single source file. I've also opened issues on those tools to get feedback there: * https://github.com/Triple-T/gradle-play-publisher/issues/227 * https://github.com/fastlane/fastlane/issues/9520 I really want to find a way to get this workflow working really smoothly. Translations are really important, and something that really should be as automated as possible.