Translating Stretchly

Posted under stretchly on Jun 11 2020

So you wanna help to translate Stretchly? Awesome!

You can now easily translate via Weblate online :)

This guide assumes that you know your way around command line and a bit or two about NodeJS, git and Github.

But if you are willing to learn something, you might be just fine, I am adding some extra notes for you. I hang-out here so that I can help you.

Prerequisites

Github account
Git

0. Download Stretchly

Go to https://github.com/hovancik/stretchly and click on Fork button in top right.

This will create a copy of Stretchly code in your account. Then find Clone or Download button in your copy and copy the url.

Clone Stretchly code from command line (with git available) - using the url you copied a second ago:

git clone https://github.com/YOURNAME/stretchly.git

If you are translating current version, you're good. But if you are coming here from newsletter about translating for Stretchly 1.0, do this: (change the branch)

git checkout redesign

Or possibly other branch, based on what are you trying to do :)

Prerequisites 2

Node.js installed (version from package.json file in the code), similar to:

"engines": {
  "node": "12.8.1"
},

If you are on Windows and installer is asking whether you wanna install extra stuff, say yes, you will save yourself some time :)

1. Install dependencies

Change to directory where Stretchly is located (the one that you just cloned with git) and install deps:

npm i

2. Try running Stretchly

Now you should be able to start Stretchly from command line (don't forget to close running instance of Stretchly, if you have one):

npm run dev or npm start

3. Translate :)

Open the folder with code in your favorite text editor and you are good to go. Translations are located in folder app/locales/ and are named by their language code, ie sk.json for Slovak.

Translations are in json format and I've tried to divide them by their location in the UI of Stretchly.

When you make update in translation file, you will need to close Stretchly and run it again (npm run dev) to see new translation in Stretchly.

We do all this complicated stuff so that we can check that translations make sense :)

Tips and tricks

Plurals

Each language handles plurals differently, thus you might see things such as translation, translation_plural and translation_0 or translation_1. Go ahead to https://jsfiddle.net/sm9wgLze, input your language code and you will see examples to help you translate correctly.

Contributor Preferences

If you wanna translate Contributor Preferences and you are not a Contributor, yet, open main.js and change the line isContributor: false to isContributor: true. Restart the app and you will be able to open Contributor Preferences from Love Stretchly.

Errors

If your translation is not working, try checking if your formatting is fine, for example with https://jsoneditoronline.org/

4. Commit and PR

Once you're done with translations and everything looks fine, you can commit your code and create pull request.

If newbie, I would recommend using some GUI program, such as Atom editor.

What you need to do:

commit the translation file
push commit to your Github repo
create a PR in my repo to correct branch from Github

Once your code is accepted, you will have my never-ending thanks, and a forever access to Contributor Preferences :)

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