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sky-map-team / stardroid

Sky Map (formerly Google Sky Map, open sourced in 2012)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.stardroid&hl=en
Apache License 2.0
893 stars 229 forks source link

Source new translations once the app's features are stable. #42

Open jaydeetay opened 8 years ago

jaydeetay commented 8 years ago

This is going to be an on-going problem and a potentially expensive one. Play Store offers facilities to get paid translations, but we probably can't do that for all languages or frequently.

barbeau commented 8 years ago

I'm interested in seeing how you end up handling this, as I haven't been able to find a great model for maintaining Android OSS project translations. FWIW, we've been using this process for another project: https://github.com/CUTR-at-USF/OpenTripPlanner-for-Android/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#maintaining-translations

It works OK, but there is always shuffling near a release where we need to go back and forth to get translations for new strings due to bugs or last minute revisions. And there is the question of when do you push a release, if you haven't gotten all translations from past contributors yet. We're only dealing with around 5 languages, so I think it's even more challenging for stardroid.

ghost commented 7 years ago

Why not use Transifex for translations?

harshendrashah commented 6 years ago

I guess the best way to handle this issue is whenever a developer or contributor adds a new resource to the default resource file, he should open an issue about the changes or the translations required and when the translations are added he/she push his/her actual changes to the repository.

mquinson commented 5 years ago

As a regular translator of free software, I would say that you should trust the community to translate your application. It works rather well for the OSMand navigation application, for example. They decided to use weblate so that everyone can contribute. As you can see, they have some level of translation in dozens of languages. 10 languages are at 100% and 13 other languages are over 90%.

When they want to add more translations, they just update the strings.xml file and when someone updates the translations on weblate, this gets commited automatically somehow.

Note that I'm neither an operator of weblate nor a contributor of OSMand. I'm just using it as an example of a large android FOSS application being nicely translated by the community.

I'm deeply involved in the translation of Debian and I'm currently maintaining the po4a project, which aims at simplifying the maintenance of documentation's translation in the FOSS galaxy. po4a itself is translated on weblate, and I get automated PR when a translation is updated. I'd love to share my expertise and help if I can (provided that I'm a noob in the android galaxy, and that I'm chronically short on time).

barbeau commented 5 years ago

I've been using Transifex (free for OSS projects) for GPSTest translation contributions over the last few months and it's worked well so far - more info on how I'm using it is here: https://github.com/barbeau/gpstest/blob/master/TRANSLATIONS.md