Support for translation (and other localization)

[ceskyDJ]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I've just found your interesting project and it looks just… great! I quickly went through the project and didn't find any localization stuff. I want every good software to be fully localized to as much as possible languages, so it could be used by even non-english speaking people. So, I'm kindly asking you about adding localization or at least simple translation possibility to your product.

Describe the solution you'd like
I'm a Czech man, so please consider that my opinions could be biased. I'd recommend to use some translation management system as Weblate or Tolgee. When you choose a good one, integration of translations (and a few other localization stuff) would be pretty easy and efficient. These two have their advantages and you definitely should take a look at them. Weblate is very popular solution used by many big projects. It has very good integration with Git, so it's like another developer in your team. The interface for translators is very clean and easy to use, do you can get so many translations in a short piece of time. I have great experience with it as an active translator of some open-source projects. Tolgee is relatively new player. It brings in-context automatic translation in the scene and in-app translation possibilities for translators. It's very good approach with great results in point of translation quality. As a translator I know the context is just very important thing to care about.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Of course, there are other systems you can use. Or, as many projects, you don't need any of them. But, as I've seen so far, these projects doesn't grow so quickly as these with translation management systems. They are just too far for non-technical oriented translators.

Additional context
If you decide to support localization, you can count on me with Czech translation and helping with some other localization for Czech people (our ancestors had just great ideas, how the best language and it's typography look like…). I offer maintained translation, as I started to do some time ago. Do, I'll constantly update the translation, as new strings will arrive with the growth of the product. I check older translations and localization stuff, too, so I try to achive very quality experience for our people.

[gorkem-bwl]

Thank you Michal. We'll definitely have a look at Weblate and Tolgee. I tried to sign up for Weblate but it seems like their signup page is broken. Should be a temporary thing tho. We'll definitely adding this feature to the roadmap soon as more than 50% of users are outside of US & Canada, so that makes a real sense to me.

[ceskyDJ]

I tried to sign up for Weblate but it seems like their signup page is broken. Should be a temporary thing tho.

Oh, interesting. I hope they'll fix it if the problem persists. But, as I tried it a few months ago, it seemed to work. I don't know if they have Discord, Slack, etc., but I'm sure they can help you via email.

When speaking of support, Tolgee has a community Slack – https://join.slack.com/t/tolgeecommunity/shared_invite/zt-2w8d8g67q-KGOTZRBBko6xldFCPUBdSA. I observe it for a few weeks and it looks good – Tolgee staff are pretty active here and most problems are solved very fast.

[ceskyDJ]

We'll definitely adding this feature to the roadmap soon as more than 50% of users are outside of US & Canada, so that makes a real sense to me.

That's awesome! So, feel free to let me know in case I can start with translating or you need some localization tips.

Maybe one hint for start (I didn't see your source code, so maybe you're already on the right way…): It's always better to put UI texts (strings that are displayed somewhere, so a user has a chance to see them) to some central space (e.g. just simple class, INI file or something like that). You could save tons of your time for the future and prevent some issues—when you'll try to find all these strings later, you definitely forget something. I've seen it many times, it can make real trouble and give very bad tone on localization process. As we say in Czechia: ”Štěstí přeje připraveným.“

[gorkem-bwl]

Maybe one hint for start (I didn't see your source code, so maybe you're already on the right way…): It's always better to put UI texts (strings that are displayed somewhere, so a user has a chance to see them) to some central space (e.g. just simple class, INI file or something like that). You could save tons of your time for the future and prevent some issues—when you'll try to find all these strings later, you definitely forget something. I've seen it many times, it can make real trouble and give very bad tone on localization process. As we say in Czechia: ”Štěstí přeje připraveným.“

Yes, that should be the way moving forward. Without a central repo where translators can enter their strings, modify/fix where necessary, it's impossible to advance much with a GitHub based translation process.

Thank you for this discussion. I'll go ahead and create an issue and one of our core developers or a contributor who has past experience will take it and advance further.

[gorkem-bwl]

I'll keep this issue open in case someone hops in and creates an initial thoughts on how a translation framework can be implemented. Even an initial methodology would be great to step in our foot in the door.