patcon
commented
3 years ago Hi! This is perhaps most easily mitigated by adding an "internationalization" mode, where all the padding words are removed and replaced with glyphs or emoji or punctuation.
E.g., Forwarded from <username>: Прывітанне Сусвет could instead be
»» <username>: Прывітанне Сусвет :)
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
A matterbridge I run is being used to connect various IRC, Telegram, and Discord channels together for Wikimedia communities. The initial communities we connected were related to software development and the channels used English as the primary human language. Some of the newer channels we are bridging are for wiki editing communities and these communities are typically formed around a particular human language. The majority of humans do not speak English, so when the bot says things like
Forwarded from <username>: Прывітанне Сусветin a channel where all the other messages are in Belarusian it is a bit jarring for the readers.The example given above is generated by Btelegram.handleForwarded. I have not done any sort of exhaustive audit of the code base to find other similarly hard coded English strings. It may turn out that there are few of them.
Describe the solution you'd like
Describe alternatives you've considered
Tengo scripts could be used to hack in localization. My bot is using a tengo script to set custom remotenickformat values which localize the protocol when appropriate.
Additional context
Once the application is localizable (string templates read from message bundles of some sort rather than hardcoded), I would be more than happy to help find a translation community to help translate the English source strings into other languages. The Wikimedia movement works with the https://translatewiki.net/ (TWN) community to receive translations for many of its FOSS projects. I can provide introductions and other material support for working with TWN.