Translations Revamp

Below are ideas to improve the Tiki interface (not content) translation system. Some were discussed at TikiFest Virtual 2021.

Aims

Add context to translatable strings

See summary: Contextual translations

As discussed on the dev list here

Status: ✔ DONE and approved during TikifestVirtual2021 on https://gitlab.com/jyhem/tiki-translations-revamp. Working solution in master: https://gitlab.com/tikiwiki/tiki/-/commit/67cbcb7ad2080c077bcd25771b7389b4243ba496. Please review/comment.

php console.php  translation:englishupdate --scm=git
php console.php  translation:getstrings
php console.php c:c

Current plan is to add an underscore with upper "C" (as in context) and parentheses wrapped string to indicate context, e.g.:

"edit_C(verb)" => "edit",
"edit_C(noun)" => "edit",
"D_C(abbrev-day)" => "D",
"M_C(abbrev-month)" => "M",
"Location_C(map)" => "Location",
"Rent_C(verb)" => "Rent",

"edit_C(verb)" => "modifier",
"edit_C(noun)" => "modification",
"D_C(abbrev-day)" => "J",
"M_C(abbrev-month)" => "M",
"Location_C(map)" => "Lieu",
"Rent_C(verb)" => "Location",

Make the Smarty block work for RTL Languages

Discussion during TikifestVirtual2021 led to the conclusion this is not a Translation Revamp issue.

Add JavaScript Translation Collecting to the Get Strings Command

Adapt php console.php translation:getstrings to populate all the missing tr() to the language.js files.
Status: Is any volunteer working on this?
How are the language.js files currently created and maintained?

Get rid of the special handling of punctuation

Status: Maybe @Jean-Marc Libs can have a look after the Add context to translatable strings part is working before the TikiFest (no promises).

As was discussed numerous times in TikiFests, the idea of automating the handling of punctuation has more drawbacks than benefits. Plus, it's one more confusing Tiki-specific thing to learn for translators.

/* Note for translators about translation of text ending with punctuation
 *
 * The current list of concerned punctuation can be found in 'lib/init/tra.php'
 * On 2009-03-02, it is: (':', '!', ';', '.', ',', '?')
 * For clarity, we explain here only for colons: ':' but it is the same for the rest
 *
 * Short version: it is not a problem that string "Login:" has no translation. Only "Login" needs to be translated.
 *
 * Technical justification:
 * If a string ending with colon needs translating (like "{tr}Login:{/tr}")
 * then Tiki tries to translate 'Login' and ':' separately.
 * This allows to have only one translation for "{tr}Login{/tr}" and "{tr}Login:{/tr}"
 * and it still allows to translate ":" as " :" for languages that
 * need it (like French)
 * Note: the difference is invisible but " :" has an UTF-8 non-breaking-space, not a regular space, but the UTF-8 equivalent of the HTML  .
 * This allows correctly displaying emails and JavaScript messages, not only web pages as would happen with  .
 */

Change our script to avoid messing up numbers

This happened more than once: https://gitlab.com/tikiwiki/tiki/-/merge_requests/2280

Status: ?

Storage of translations

Should we store in a DB instead of Source Control?

• -1 from me as that would increase DB size (and database backups) dramatically

Backporting / forward porting

• We could encourage translators to improve translations directly on GitLab.
• And then, we periodically automatically backport translations to active branches (if strings match).

Related

• Also see i18n