Investigate how to support internationalization in the Hypothesis client

robertknight commented 7 years ago

Problem you are trying to address with this feature

As a publisher of non-English language content I would like to use Hypothesis to add an annotation layer to my content.
As a non-English speaking user, I would like the Hypothesis extension to be available in a language that I understand.

Your solution

We'll need to investigate the various options available for handling i18n (including translation) in the client, across both the annotator layer and the sidebar application and figure out the workflows involved.

Things we'll need to support:

Translating the strings displayed in both the host page, annotator layer and sidebar, including correct pluralisation.
Using locale-appropriate formatting for absolute and relative dates
Translating strings displayed in the browser extension, outside of the client UI itself.

Things we'll need to figure out:

The workflow for managing translations for the client & service, including what happens when we release new client versions that add new strings that need to be translated.
How to load only the appropriate translations into the client, and more generally, how to minimize the network/processing tax imposed by i18n.

Tools we might want to look into:

FormatJS is a set of JS libs & polyfills to support i18n.
Whatever the standard i18n tools are for Angular v1 apps.

klemay commented 6 years ago

Request for French via Zendesk: https://hypothesis.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/2208

klemay commented 6 years ago

Comment in Chrome store:

Is it possible to include a word translation dictionary for the extension? I use another extension, but it "fights" for space and it becomes difficult to click on the correct icon.

klemay commented 6 years ago

From Zendesk:

I am exploring using Hypothes.is for social reading of an Arabic language PDF (with right-to-left text). I've noticed that the selection feature has difficulty selecting words here - it seems that it want to interpret my selection as if it were a left-to-right text. Is there any way to set the language direction preferences for selection with Hypothes.is?

We may want to add "right-to-left text highlighting" to the list of things to support.

renehamburger commented 5 years ago

Is internationalisation (i18n) of your client on your roadmap? It seems to be a prerequisite for publishers embedding the client on their non-English site.

I've used https://github.com/i18next/ng-i18next in the past. It's an i18n-framework for AngularJS that's easy to set-up and pretty small.

You'd probably want to include a json for English strings in your client to prevent the need to load a second resource. For all other languages a json could be loaded from your site or a CDN.

The AngularJS date filter already supports localisation.

mkdir-washington-edu commented 5 years ago

Offer for English -> Spanish client translation once above work is done: https://hypothesis.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/6154

AndrewJudson commented 4 years ago

Is this still on the roadmap? what can other people do to help?

klemay commented 4 years ago

@AndrewJudson it's still a long-term goal, though I can say that we're currently doing some refactoring work on our client that will make projects like this one much easier. We have several offers for help with an English -> Spanish translation once we do get to this, and if you'd be able to help with any other languages it'd be great to note that here so we can reach out in the future!

mkdir-washington-edu commented 4 years ago

Request for Japanese: https://hypothesis.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/13906