✨ Help Wanted! | Add Weblate i18n Support

[jonaharagon]

Checklist

• Homepage
• Providers
  • Avoid US Services
  • Cloud Storage
  • DNS
  • Email
  • Hosting
  • Pastebin
  • Search
  • Social Networks
  • Social News Aggregators
  • VPN
• Browser
  • Fingerprint
  • Browser Addons (I18n #1138)
  • Tweaks
  • Recommendation
  • WebRTC Section
• Software
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  • Notebook
  • Email Alternatives
  • Email Clients
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  • Productivity
  • Real-Time Communication
    • IM
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  • File Sync
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  • Self-Hosted Cloud
• OS
  • Android Add-ons
  • Windows 10 (In progress: privacytoolsIO/privacy-tools@cb2ae14)
  • Live CD (I18n #1163)
  • Mobile (I18n #1163)
  • PC (I18n #1163)
  • Router (I18n #1163)
• Services Page (I18n #1138)
• Donate
• Contact
• Navbar
• Footer (I18n #1138)

Description

Alright. So it turns out if we use jekyll-multiple-languages-plugin and throw every single string on the site into /_i18n/en.yml we can then use our Weblate install to translate the site much easier.

The problem of course, is moving all the strings manually 😅

So that's going to be my project for now. As of df38bc4 I have successfully moved... the index page to en.yml, which took about an hour 🙄

If anyone wants to help me out with this (which I would greatly appreciate), I'm doing this work in the i18n branch of this repo. If you aren't an org member you can create Pull Requests to that branch (as opposed to master), by selecting i18n instead as the base branch in your pull request:

What needs to be done

Every English text string in every (HTML and Markdown) file needs to be moved to a key in en.yml. For example, lets look this line in _includes/sections/privacy-resources.html:

...
<h1 id="resources" class="anchor"><a href="#resources"><i class="fas fa-link anchor-icon"></i></a> More Privacy Resources</h1>
...

That is of course the More Privacy Resources header on the homepage. What I've done is taken the English text out of that line, and placed it en.yml, like so:

...
privacy_resources:
  header: "More Privacy Resources"
  ...

Then, back in the HTML file, I replaced the English text with {% t privacy_resources.header %} (which is a Jekyll tag saying to translate the string privacy_resources.header (from the lines above). Like so:

<h1 id="resources" class="anchor"><a href="#resources"><i class="fas fa-link anchor-icon"></i></a> {% t privacy_resources.header %}</h1>

Which really isn't that hard! It's simply time consuming to copy/paste everything into this file.

Extra note about translating {% include card.htmls

Okay, so there is one slightly more complicated bit. You can't add the {% t tags inside the {% include` tags. For example, you cannot do this:

{% include cardv2.html
title="{% t browser_addons.privacy_badger_title %}"
description="{% t browser_addons.privacy_description %}"
...

You must instead use some fancy {% capture tags, like so:

{%- capture title1 -%}{% t browser_addons.privacy_badger_title %}{%- endcapture -%}
{%- capture descr1 -%}{% t browser_addons.privacy_description %}{%- endcapture -%}

{% include cardv2.html
title=title1
description=descr1
...

It isn't too complicated, just some extra steps. Look at what I did in resources.html for a more complete example.

en.yml

You can see how I've formatted this file already, but basically it should be like:

PAGE:
  KEY: "String"

Where "Page" is the section being translated, Key is a brief description, and "String" is the English text. At the top there is also a "Global" section, for strings that are reused a bunch on different pages:

global:
  further_reading: "Further Reading"

Pretty much everything needs to go into this file, and then this file will automatically be used as the base in Weblate upon which all translations will be based on (which will be far easier).

[abbluiz]

How is this going so far? I'm the main Portuguese maintainer at https://www.privacidade.digital/ (https://github.com/PrivacidadeDigital/privacidade.digital)

I confess I was a little concerned with this idea because if you separate the strings in some ways, it would be difficult or impossible to translate to certain languages (if you break sentences). Also, the privacytools domain and basically all of its services (including forum posts that are referenced on the site) are not translated to other languages. There is also a lot of links to external sites that are only available in English. Making all of the strings available as yaml files and on one domain would not allow other language maintainers to change these links to more appropriate ones, or add sections related to their countries.

However, there might be some way to work around this with jekyll-multiple-language-plugins using translated pages and permalinks.

[dawidpotocki]

How is this going so far? I'm the main Portuguese maintainer at https://www.privacidade.digital/

It's meh.

I confess I was a little concerned with this idea because if you separate the strings in some ways, it would be difficult or impossible to translate to certain languages (if you break sentences).

Yeah, that's an issue.

There is also a lot of links to external sites that are only available in English.

We can add `<a href="">` links to yaml file.

[jonaharagon]

I confess I was a little concerned with this idea because if you separate the strings in some ways, it would be difficult or impossible to translate to certain languages (if you break sentences).

This is probably the main issue to figure out. Jekyll is not super fantastic as an easily translatable platform.