Questions to the devs concerning the localization project

critdroid 2017-07-17 18:33:03 UTC #1

Dear devs

Localization indeed is an ambitious plan to promote F-Droid and to make it more popular. Meanwhile I spent quite a lot of time on translating F-Droid to German via Weblate but there are several affairs I don't really understand.

For example the Data section. You' ll find there a couple of marketing texts for a handful of - randomly selected(?) - apps out of hundreds available from F-Droid. Curiously some of them are already translated at another place. DictionariesForMIDs has an excellent translated description hosted on Crowdin. AntennaPod can already be seen in German on F-Droid. The Wikipedia app is translated - I guess - by Wikimedia volunteers. Their text differs considerably from that provided on Weblate.
So, what are we doing here? Re-inventing the wheel? Why isn't it possible to use the existing things? And what should happen to all those apps which are not included?

Next. The WebsitePosts, they are announcing fundamental changes of F-Droid in particular for the current year 2017. Even now these notifications are almost out of date, the work on them is rather useless. The last third of this year is near and therefore I must ask, when will these announcements finally reach the public? In 2018 they don't make sense anymore.
Why were they submitted for translation at such an early state while the WebsiteDocs a huge file with over 10.000 words was held back?

At the moment the official site is still in English. There's no way to change the language. There's only a page in test mode on GitLab. This page unfortunately doesn't get any update. Though a lot of changes of translations have occured during the last weeks, the page remains the same all the time. For the translators that's disappointing. They cannot check out wether their translations will fit or should be revised. An update per week or fortnight would be a great help here. Couldn't that be managed?

hans 2017-07-17 18:59:33 UTC #2

We're still figuring out the whole workflow of translating the website, so bear with us. The idea is that we'd post all the source texts on Weblate, and leave it up to the translators as to which posts and pages are worth translating.

You can see the translated site on the staging site, that updates whenever new code/text/translations are merged in:
https://fdroid.gitlab.io/fdroid-website/

We have to nail down the whole automatic deployment to https://f-droid.org, so that's a bit slow to update right now. @pserwylo has done most of the web programming for the localization. @grote @NicoAlt and I are doing bits and pieces.

As for the duplicated app translations, I wasn't able to find the translation sources for those apps, so I scraped them from the web. It is a somewhat random collection of the more popular apps in f-droid.org. It is fully possible to use the upstream translation if they add them in a standard form in the source repo:
https://f-droid.org/docs/All_About_Descriptions_Graphics_and_Screenshots

We want to manage as few app translations as possible, but some are very unlikely to ever include those files in their source repos, for example, Barcode Scanner. For apps that do have their own translation files, we should move whatever we have to their source repos.

hans 2017-07-17 19:02:27 UTC #3

Its also the first time any of the devs involved have localized a website, so any help there would be most appreciated!

critdroid 2017-07-20 21:18:35 UTC #4

Funny, 4 days later this site is only available in Chinese, Tibetan and Turkish (latter unmerged). European languages are excluded.

hans 2017-09-06 11:43:24 UTC #5

We’re aiming to launch the fully localized project this month. Its a
big project.