Android: Help Translate the App

[CDRussell]

New languages

We are adding additional languages to the app and need your help to improve our translations.

Do you know any of the following languages, and want to help us improve? If so, please see https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/blob/develop/TRANSLATIONS.md for instructions on how you can help us improve the app.

List of languages

• Bulgarian (bg)
• Croatian (hr)
• Czech (cs)
• Danish (da)
• Dutch (nl)
• Estonian (et) - JUST ADDED
• Finnish (fi)
• French (fr)
• German (de)
• Greek (el)
• Hungarian (hu)
• Italian (it)
• Latvian (lv) - JUST ADDED
• Lithuanian (lt)
• Norwegian bokmål (nb)
• Polish (pl)
• Portuguese (pt)
• Romanian (ro)
• Russian (ru)
• Slovak (sk)
• Slovenian (sl)
• Spanish (es)
• Swedish (sv)
• Turkish (tr) - JUST ADDED

For now, we're only looking for improvements to the list of languages identified and are not looking to add completely new languages yet. We may however request help doing this in future.

[coffeeplanter]

Hi, I've seen the current Russian translation. It's pretty accurate and tidy, in my opinion. But I'll make a pull-request with some changes.
And... why to translate string resources marked as non translatable? )

[CDRussell]

non translatable should indicate things like the company name, where DuckDuckGo doesn't need to be translated. however, it's possible some things have been incorrectly marked as non-translatable that should be translated, or things are currently translated that shouldn't be.

A tidy-up PR would be awesome! 🙏

[renanferrari]

not looking to add completely new languages yet

Would it be ok to add language variants, since it may not be considered a "completely new language"?

I'm asking this because I believe Brazilian Portuguese would be a great addition in the list, based on the fact that it is – by far – the most widely spoken Portuguese variant in the world, while European Portuguese is only the fourth:

Rank | Country | Number of Portuguese Speakers (Est.)
-- | -- | --
1 | Brazil | 204,000,000
2 | Angola | 20,455,100
3 | Mozambique | 14,400,000
4 | Portugal | 10,320,000
5 | Guinea-Bissau | 272,400
6 | Cape Verde | 215,000
7 | Sao Tome and Principe | 199,910
8 | Macao | 6,800

Source

I believe this is the most relevant data to take into account, so I'm leaving aside more subjective issues like the negative effects on usability or the feeling of unfamiliarity when using the app – besides, I might be biased towards those, since I'm Brazilian myself.

Summing up, if you agree that prioritizing languages spoken by larger audiences is the main factor to be taken into consideration here, then I suggest you approve PR #598, which was opened a few weeks ago. Otherwise, I'd love to know of any other factors that I may not be aware of. Either way, I'll be happy to hear your thoughts on this.

[geekanamika]

@CDRussell If you are planning to translate the app to Hindi (Hi) in near future, I would be happy to help. Thanks.

[subsymbolic]

We are adding Estonian, Latvian & Turkish support as well as filling in gaps across our already supported languages and would appreciate any help validating these translations too.

See https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/pull/740 for a list of upcoming changes.

[cmonfortep]

Friendly reminder for folks following this issue and future readers.

We have updated our Translations contribution guidelines. See them here: https://github.com/duckduckgo/Android/blob/develop/TRANSLATIONS.md

Important part is that now we are using an external service that should increase the quality of our translations. So now we only accept contributions to fix actual issues (typos, grammatical errors) and won't accept minor changes that are only focused on tweaking the wording.

[oldphones68]

@CDRussell Bro!
Is there any option to contribute if I can't or don't want to use the xml format?
Say for example, I had seen some devs to use something like Google Sheets to translate.
There are the main terms/words/sentences in the left column and people translate on the specific right columns dedicated for each language.

Proobably, for you it may become harder to build from that, but from non-programmers, it may seems more handy.

Hope you'll understand and consider.

Regards!

[cmonfortep]

@oldphones68 the only way to contribute to our source code in Github is by opening a Pull request, and that should follow the XML format so we can merge your contribution.

If you are a non-programmer and you spot any major issue with any of our translations, a good idea will be to just open us a bug report via Github Issues. In the description, you can give us some details and propose a new translation. We can take it from there and give feedback to our translation service. Hope that answers your question. Thanks!

[oldphones68]

Thank you so much! @cmonfortep