Use Weblate for localisation

[lexisother]

I wondered if Weblate had been considered for localising the app. At the moment, JSON files are used, and are not particularly user friendly to edit.

Any thoughts?

[SpacingBat3]

The thing is WebCord's localization is quite non-standard since English strings are put directly inside source code of the application to actually fetch a type from them. Other thing is language codes as well, they don't seem to be ISO codes according to the Electron's documentation and are strictly dependent from Chromium's l10n code. So, I am aware that even if I would setup a Weblate project for it, it would generate a files/language codes WebCord couldn't correctly understand and just not load.

[lexisother]

What's keeping you from writing helper functions that parse whatever Weblate can spit out? Note that Weblate can generate a whole lot of formats, some even human-readable. And, well, the machine can parse anything when provided with the right toolset, as they say.

[SpacingBat3]

The question is if Weblate could fetch that and understand. I'm not familiar with Weblate, but I feel it would take me more that its worth it, plus Weblate itself is not free for everyone (even through my repo is open-source and non-commercial, I'm still aware of that).

Also, I feel like the best way to translate the app is to understand what is translated and where, to find the correct word for that. And once WebCord is capable to hot-loading with the external translations, there could be a way of injecting the translations from the read-writable directory in order to have a look how translations are working without rebuilding the app (this however was originally made to decentralize the localization, yet I feel now this might be a bad decision). I doubt something like that could be achieved on Weblate.

Other thing is that the current English translations are put inside the application itself. And moving it outside would mean that I either need to change the current directory or create a type definitions for localization files that may cause an app to crash on runtime on type mismatch.

Anyway, as I still haven't done with the localization implementation, things may change in the future... It's still should be said that not all Electron projects, even those more popular than WebCord gives an option to localize it. Maybe I could move my implementation outside WebCord once its done through, so other projects could benefit from it. Right now I've placed it in beta state just to declare that things may vary and its not the experience I'm happy with.

[smartfrigde]

The question is if Weblate could fetch that and understand

It can! I decided to fork the project and set it up on a Weblate instance and it's working well. The only thing that needed a change is file extension of translations from .jsonc to simple .json. If you want to have comments to indicate where string is used you can add them in Weblate panel. You can also add screenshots.

Weblate itself is not free for everyone

There's an open source instance of Weblate available for open source projects.. You can also use @lexisother instance that's available here for free.

Other thing is that the current English translations are put inside the application itself. And moving it outside would mean that I either need to change the current directory

You would need to move English translations from l10n.ts to a folder. It would behave the same as Polish language. This can be seen in this commit

[lexisother]

Bump? @SpacingBat3

[SpacingBat3]

@smartfrigde thank you for actually working on this! However, it is not really that simple to move things in my code to make them functional – a lot of the directories are actually hard-coded and changing the source code structure to have JSON files being statically imported (to get the type information from the JSON files from English and compare them) would be actually quite time-consuming.

The other doubts I have is the translation metadata to give the translators an attribution for their work. How could I get that information? Is Weblate providing any API for this?

Another, more serious problem is the Git vs Weblate translation coexistence – for instance, I read that developer of enricocid/Music-Player-GO had some trouble with coexistence of both Weblate translation merges and Pull Request made by people not wanting to use Weblate for translating the app. He eventually came with the sollution to stop of merging the PRs, leaving the Weblate the only option for doing the translations. My other doubts are that Weblate might be even conflicting with the changes I push directly into the repository.

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@smartfrigde, could you make a draft PR if you want to? I might either create a branch specifically for this feature to experiment that with or directly commit to your fork. For drafts, you might want to create a checklist for what's implemented and what needs to be done so it will be more understandable for everyone about the progress on that feature.