How to translate our apps to your language

Translation is a volunteer community effort. If you want the app to speak your language or want to improve the current translation please join us. We use the online tool at translate.metactrl.com. The service is provided by a third party, Crowdin. You need to register an account there but registration is free.

Signup, Login, Join the Project

  • Go to translate.metactrl.com, and click on the Sign Up button on the top right corner. It leads you to another page where you can choose to sign in with your Facebook, Google, Twitter,.. account or create a new account and login with your email / password.
  • If you already have Crowdin account, just login and join Dropsync project.
  • You don’t need to wait for approval from the project owner (me). Once logged in and joint the Dropsync project, you can start translating right away.

crowdin.net screenshot

Translating

  • On the translation project page translate.metactrl.com click the flag of your language
  • The project has several files, you need to translate all of them. Choose one that has not been completely translated yet, click on the Translate button on the right side of that file.
  • The translating interface opens (see the screenshot)
  • In the left column, choose a string to translate
  • Red bullet means the string needs to be translated. This is the core job.
  • Green bullet means the string is already translated, you can check if it is correct, but you don’t have to.
  • You can use the filter icon at the top of the left column to filter only the untranslated strings
  • When you click the string in the left column, you can type the translation to the text box in the middle of the screen. Then you submit it with Commit Translation
  • There is an automatic translation under the text box. Use it for reference only, these translations are wrong in most of cases!
  • If a translation is already there, you can vote by clicking on the + sign if it’s correct. If it’s not correct, vote down the current translation and type the correct translation to the text box above.
  • In the right column, there is a comment section. If you need more info about the context of the string you can type your question in the box at the bottom of the right column.
  • There are more pages, make sure you go through all of the strings!

Important

  • strings_common.xml, strings_dropsync.xml, and similarly named files are strings compiled into the app. When translating them you need to be careful with special characters.
  • Be sure to leave special characters like \n, %d, %s, <![CDATA[, ]]>, <p>, <br>, etc. intact and in the right context - these are variables that will be replaced with numbers and/or words.
  • If your translation contains an apostrophe ', it must be preceded by a backslash \. For example if you mean to say dell'app, you need to enter dell\'app instead. The backslash character \ must be there to make the compiler happy. It will be stripped out before being displayed in the app.