There are a couple of things you should be aware of if you want to translate the ToonStore.
Each translation file is in the locales directory, with a name like en-US.json or pt-BR.json. These filenames are code for what language and country/region the translation is meant for. If you don't know your language and country codes, you can look them up here and here respectively, or just contact me and I'll look it up for you.
To start a new translation, copy and paste the contents of en-US.json into a new file by clicking the "+" icon next to the directory name. Name the new file {language}-{region}.json, where {language} and {region} are your language and region codes, respectively. If your language is too specific to have a region, just leave it off, e.g. {language}.json.
The translation files themselves are in what is called JSON format. Try not to be intimidated, it's quite simple. All you
really need to know is that the text is broken into keys and values separated by a colon (:). They might be grouped
inside brackets ({ and }), but you don't need to worry about that.
For each key/value pair, all you need to do is translate the English text (the value) into your native language. For example,
if the original en-US.json file looked like this:
{
"greeting": "Hello!"
}
And I was making an Italian translation, then I would create the file it-IT.json and it would look like this:
{
"greeting": "Ciao!"
}
The translation files are more or less sorted by priority, so if you're only going to be doing a partial translation, then start at the top of the file and work your way down. The language won't go live until the translation is finished though, so try to find someone to finish your partial translations if you're not going to finish it.
Some of the text will have special replacement markers (%s or {{label}}) in them. When the translation is used, that marker will be
replaced by some other text. For example, the header for the user page looks like "%s's page" in the translation file,
but will appear on the website as "Derogatory's page" or similar. When translating, make sure that you keep the replacement markers
in your text, so that it is correctly substituted for the site.
Sometimes single sentences will be broken into multiple key/value pairs. When you encounter this, make sure that spaces at the beginning and end of the fragments are kept. Otherwise, when the sentence is put together, some words will get smashed together. Consider the following translation fragment:
"donate": {
"f1": "Have you considered ",
"f2": "donating",
"f3": " to help keep the ToonStore online and ad-free?"
}
Notice that f1 has a space at the end, and f3 has a space at the beginning. If those were removed, then the resulting sentence would be "Have you considereddonatingto help keep the ToonStore online and ad-free?". Clearly that's not what we want, so make sure the spaces are kept.
If you're doing a translation, submit pull requests early and often. This gives me a chance to verify that everything still technically works in your language, and allows other people to potentially help you with the work of translating. If you're not a developer, then you can see what your translation looks like before it goes live (but after I accept your pull request) by going to the developer preview version at http://toonstore.net:3000.
If you're using Bash, you can check your progress percentage using the following one-liner:
echo "scale=3; `diff -y --suppress-common-lines locales/en-US.json locales/MY-LANG-HERE.json | wc -l`/`grep '": "' locales/en-US.json | wc -l`*100" | bc -l
where you replace MY-LANG-HERE with your language/country code.
- Github: stevenvergenz
- E-mail: [email protected]
- Google+ Group: https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/100638011667854470760
- Reddit: OutOfMemory