Monica: L10n issues

[yarons]

I've started translating Monica and I have several question:

1. Is it OK to transliterate Monica to my native script? (For example: مونيكا, Моника, מוניקה, モニカ, ሞኒካ, etc.)
2. Can I add plural form if the string did not support that originally?
3. Can I add gender reference the same way I can add plural forms? (I know that this app is gender agnostic in a way but when talking about an age we add a gender specific word, no way to avoid it).

[asbiin]

Hi @yarons

1. Yes you are welcome to translate Monica in any language !

1. Plurals are handled by Laravel, see https://laravel.com/docs/5.5/localization#pluralization
   For any text that should be "pluralized", we have to transform the trans method used to trans_choice, so we will have to update the code behind. What original texts you wanted to pluralized ?
   For now there are only 6 texts like this in monica:
2. app.footer_modal_version_release_away
3. people.people_list_contacts_per_tags
4. people.reminder_frequency_day
5. people.reminder_frequency_week
6. people.reminder_frequency_month

7. people.reminder_frequency_year

8. For gender specific text selection ... I don't know how to do this right now ! It's way more difficult than plural form.

[djaiss]

Thanks a lot @yarons

We don't have the notion of gender specific text selection for a single string currently. I do realize though that it's critical for some languages.

To allow this, we would have to create a _female_ version of each string that we know it contains a notion of gender, and then in the code, call a new method that would either put the male version of the string, or the female one.

However, if people use a gender that is not male or female... I have no idea how we can realistically handle this case. This would be a translation nightmare. Perhaps we could display in the UI saying that we apologize for not supporting all the strings with this specific genre, and that we will use either the male version, or the female version, for a given gender (that might be configurable per gender).

[yarons]

@djaiss It should be somewhat similar to the plural forms but with a global parameter for gender in each session, not a big deal because I somehow passed it with rephrasing but having this ability would be awesome, I think that Fluent (Formerly L20n) by Mozilla have this feature.

For every extra gender we can just use the "neutral form" this way in French or Russian we can have 3 gender forms: Male, Female, Neutral (He, She, It) or keep it as 2 or less gender forms when unnecessary (Just like in English).

The main and most important thing to keep in mind with this modular forms is to keep the options while not affecting the languages that don't need that, same way you did with the plural forms so far, I needed an extra form for Hebrew so I just added it according to the rules, translators that don't need that or need more (like Arabic and Polish, both have somewhere around 6 plural forms) can just understand the syntax and act accordingly.

[asbiin]

Is it the same idea as #287 ?

[yarons]

@asbiin Close enough I guess :smile: Not sure about the suggestion of implementation but it should yield the same results I suppose.

[yarons]

I would also like to know if there's any staging environment where I can use my translation and try and fix if there's something wrong.

[asbiin]

@yarons we don't have a staging environment yet, but I can create a environment with heroku on demand. Just ask me on the related PR.

[yarons]

@asbiin Is there an English staging version where I can compare and see if something is incorrectly mirrored or disappeared?

Thanks!