2.5 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 Translations
Generally you wan to fetch the latest translations whenever releasing. The exception being if you have recently changed lots of existing source strings that haven't had a chance to be translated.
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.
Sometimes you'll pull down a translation which isn't yet tracked by git. This means that translation recently became sufficiently complete to include in the project. As well as adding it to git, you need to update the Xcode project to include the new localization.
Writing Good Translatable Strings
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"
Be sure to include comments in your translations, and enforce that other contributors do as well. Why comment? For example, in English these are the same, but in 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?
Extract Source Strings
To extract the latest translatable strings and comments from our local source files (Signal-iOS and SignalServiceKit):
bin/auto-genstrings
Upload Strings to be Translated
Make new source strings available to our translators by uploading them to transifex. Immediately after uploading we also need to pull down the updated translations. Granted, at this point the new strings will be in English until translated, but English is preferable to the string name like ARCHIVE_HEADER which we'd otherwise see.
To push the new source strings and then fetch the resultant translations:
bin/sync-translations