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Update Translation documentation to 2022

Context

As of 2021-10: The interface translation process in Tiki needs some love. We have seen some failures like

  • Transifex (A volunteer started the project and then became unavailable)
  • i18n.tiki.org (which we are restarting now)

and some successes like

  • Translations Revamp
  • Migration of all related CLI scripts to php console.php translation:*
  • Some keen community members reporting issues with untranslatable strings


The current status is that it's confusing for translators to get started.

Let's clean this up.

Let's have a 2 hour online session with the experts of this topic and clarify the high-level direction, and 2 or 3 multilingual junior developers will start using, and refine the documentation as they go.

The most important point is to decide where to converge all the documentation related to translators: doc.tiki.org vs tiki.org vs dev.tiki.org vs translation.tiki.org Then, move/update all the docs while adding redirects to old pages.

Who

What

There should be at least 3 ways to contribute translations

  1. Via GitLab's web interface
  2. Via Git process that all devs use (CLI, IDE, etc.)
  3. i18n.tiki.org (for in-context translations and/or other non-tech savvy Users/Translators familiar interface everyone can use?)


There should be at least these sections:

  • How to edit/add strings to an existing translation
    • language.php
    • language.js
  • How to add a new language
  • How to contribute (and merge) 3rd party/external translations (e.g. made in-context on their local Tiki installation and exported from there)


Special cases:

  • Same term in English has more than one meaning in a translation, depending on context
    IE: The English word "Location" exist and is used for a place (geo-location trackeritem) while it also also exist in French for a place or renting an apartment.
  • I changed a string in English and I don't want to break translations
  • Contribute translations to trunk, and after, backport to a branch (ex.: Tiki21 LTS)


Everyone listed above, please review all documentation on *.tiki.org to make sure a new community member can contribute translations to trunk via GitLab. Developers can be sent to normal Git contribution workflow, while non coders should have a recipe to use the web interface.

All scripts are converging to console.php and docs need updating:
https://gitlab.com/tikiwiki/tiki/-/merge_requests/717Question
https://gitlab.com/tikiwiki/tiki/-/commit/be39ca6315a1432c019e5976ef796a4222edbddeQuestion

While documenting, let's think of opportunities for enhancements and automation. Ex.:

How to reduce waste disk space in Tiki source code?

  • GitLab is tracking many lines with English to English commented translations like
    Copy to clipboard
    // "Registration & Log in" => "Registration & Log in",
    • There was a parameter to clean up all commented out lines from language.php in getstrings script, no?


Running php console.php translation:getstringsQuestion as part of the CI would generate a lot of noise.

Maybe translators should have Translation Priorities and run translation:getstrings on their instance before contributing translations?

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