Translating Luft

Luft speaks English, Albanian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Maltese, Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk), Polish, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian in Cyrillic and in Latin script, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. Translating it into one of these, or into a new language, needs no programming: everything goes through Weblate in the browser.

Getting started

1. Sign in to Hosted Weblate and open the Luft project.
2. Pick a component, such as kestrel-surfaces for Start and quick settings or settings-devices for those pages of Settings, and your language. If your language isn’t listed yet, Start new translation adds it.
3. Translate string by string. Weblate shows each string’s context, the agreed term for every word in the glossary, and checks for things like a missing variable.

Weblate turns the work into pull requests on GitHub, and translations reach the nightly builds once they’re merged.

Before you translate

• Read your language’s style guide in docs/translations. It says how Luft addresses people in your language, how buttons are phrased and which words were chosen for Luft’s own features.
• If your language is already there, its list in docs/translations-review names the strings that most need a native speaker’s eye, and why.
• Use the glossary. Start, Board, Quick Settings and the other names of Luft’s features should read the same everywhere.
• Keep the tone friendly but calm: short, plain sentences, no exclamation marks.
• App names such as Rover, Mailman and Magpie stay as they are.
• Serbian is translated in Cyrillic only; the Latin version is made from it automatically.

The format

Luft’s strings are Fluent messages. Most are plain text. A few have parts to keep as they are:

• Variables like { $name } or { $count } are filled in by Luft. Keep them, and move them wherever your sentence needs them.

• Plurals choose a form by number. Your language may need more forms than English: Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian use one, few and other.

  notifications-count = { $count ->
      [one] { $count } obavijest
      [few] { $count } obavijesti
     *[other] { $count } obavijesti
  }

• Dates, times, numbers and units come from the system already formatted for the reader, so they’re variables too.

Comments above a string say where it appears and what it means when the English alone could mean two things.

Seeing your translation

Anyone building Luft can try a translation before it’s merged: start Kestrel with LUFT_LOCALE set to the language, such as LUFT_LOCALE=sq kestrel/tools/session.sh nested, and the desktop and every app opened from it use that language. Building Luft covers setting that up.

Problems with the English text itself, such as an unclear string, are best reported in the issues.