Some strings seem untranslatable

Denis Bitouzé
I joined the Zotero translation team to help translate it completely, as I noticed that some strings had not yet been translated, particularly in the dialog box that appears when you visit the Tools → Plugins menu:

- Plugins
- Manage Your Plugins
- Enabled
- Remove
- Manage

as well as all the strings in the boxes that appear when you visit the menus under the cogwheel and under the “...” button.

However, unless I am mistaken, these strings seem untranslatable. Am I missing something?
  • aborel
    Which language is missing these translations?
  • Denis Bitouzé
    French but at:

    https://app.transifex.com/zotero/zotero/dashboard/

    this language is said to be fully translated. Moreover, at:

    https://app.transifex.com/zotero/zotero/language/fr_FR/

    searching for “Manage” or “Plugins” give 0 result.
  • aborel
    edited 2 days ago
    Indeed these strings are apparently not in the Zotero internationalization files.
    If I understand correctly, the Zotero build process collects some Firefox files and modifies them. I can find "Manage Your Plugins" hard-coded in the app/scripts/fetch_xulrunner script from the Zotero source directory. Perhaps it could use localized strings instead?
  • Denis Bitouzé
    Would be nice if these strings could be localized...
  • aborel
    edited yesterday at 3:25am
    After a closer look at the Zotero source code, the fetch_xulrunner script actually uses these strings to modify some Firefox localization files (For the Mac version it would act on localization/en-US/toolkit/about/aboutAddons.ftl contained in Firefox.app/Contents/Resources/omni.ja). So I'd say it's partially doing the right thing.

    Problems, as far as I can see:
    - the Zotero-specific strings are hard-coded in the script
    - the script only retrieves the en-US localization files from Firefox and ignores other languages
    - the script seems to explicitly use the en-US builds from Firefox (on my Max, Firefox omni.ja contains en-US and fr)

    All of these issues are probably resolvable, but it looks like a non-negligible amount of work. fetch_xulrunner would need to be significantly rewritten, I'm not sure how it could impact other Zotero components. I feel a few non-trivial choices would also be necessary. Would the Zotero team accept a pull request for this? Is there already something on their mind in this area?

  • dstillman
    It's the TODO above those lines:
    # TODO: Use our own strings, but for now fix the bundled English ones
    The fix will be in the code, not in fetch_xulrunner. We have to add our own localized strings and modify the add-ons window to use them instead of Mozilla localized strings. We have an open ticket for this.

    (For a few of the generic strings like "Manage" we could use Mozilla's strings, but we can't do that until we add our own for the others.)
  • aborel
    Thanks for the pointer!

    The translation teams will be happy to contribute when the time comes.
Sign In or Register to comment.