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Translation is done by human translators.
- If you are willing to help with string translations, join the translation team and contact Peter Murray, he will set you up on lokalise.com.
- To begin work on translations for a new language or region, contact Peter Murray.
Currently all translators must use the web tool Lokalise (https://lokalise.com/) that shows the English text and a text field for the translation. Lokalise gives advice when the text contains placeholders and offers machine translations as suggestions.
- Do you want to use a different online or offline computer aided translation tool (CAT)? Contact Peter Murray to setup downloading and uploading XLIFF files.
- You are a developer? Read Explain internationalization and localization.
Translation deployment
- Translations are moved from Lokalise to the
/translations/directories of GitHub repositories by a script that Peter Murray runs every few days. They show up as a pull request on eachstripes-*,ui-*,andmod-*repository as applicable, are run through the CI tests, and automatically merged. CI tests don't always pass and may require manual restart. - This is a one-way process. Any manual change to locale files on GitHub will be overwritten and are lost when new locale files from Lokalise come in.
- https://folio-snapshot.dev.folio.org/ is the first reference environment where new or changed translations appear because it uses the master branch. Other reference environments take longer because they only use released front-end module versions, see Reference Environments for details.
- Any FOLIO release like Honeysuckle, Iris, etc. ships with the translations that come with each front-end module. Each front-end module has a different release date (Honeysuckle example). This is the time when translations are taken from module's GitHub translations directory and is different for each front-end module. A new front-end module release is needed to get more recent translation included into a FOLIO release.
However, the sysOp of a FOLIO installation may manually update the translations of their installation by exchanging the files in the
/translations/directory from where the static files are shipped. See Backport how to do it.Translation keys deleted from
en.jsonstill exist on lokalise.com for older FOLIO releases. Example: A translation key is no longer in use in Iris release, but translators are still working on the Honeysuckle release where it is use.- TODO: Write a script that removes translation keys on lokalise.com after a grace period. Old translations will remain in the GitHub history (example). Proposal for grace period: 4 months, matching the release cycle.
- TODO: Write a script that searches for translation keys deleted from
en.jsonand add a comment on lokalise.com stating the last FOLIO release it is in use. - TODO: Write a script that checks that all translation keys in en.json are still in use in that ui module and fail a pull request if not. An exemption file, for example
/translations/protected-translation-keys.json, lists translations keys that should not fail the pull request, this is for translation keys that are dynamically concatenated at run-time, that are used by other modules, or that fail at the time when the script is installed and need to be checked at a later time. The value inprotected-translation-keys.jsonexplains the reason, for example "dynamically created" or "TODO: check whether this key is still in use, remove if not".
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- English: <strong>Warning:</strong> The deletion cannot be undone.
- German: <strong>Warnung:</strong> Die Löschung kann nicht rückgängig gemacht werden.
If a replacement or a tag exists in the English message but is missing from the translated message Lokalise warns with the </> icon (placeholder/HTML mismatch icon) on red background to indicate a potential translation error.
Language rules
See Language rules in "MOTIF: The FOLIO design system" for the user experience (UX) recommendations and guidelines for the language of text in FOLIO's user interface.
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