An often requested feature in GlotPress has been to be able to support locale “variants”.  This has been tracked as issue #226 on GitHub and has been open since January 2016.

Locale variants allows for a “root” language to have one or more “variants” of the language in which the variants automatically inherits the translations of the root for any missing translations.

This is useful for many popular languages, for instance English, Spanish, French, etc.  where the vast majority of the translations are likely to be identical with minimal differences for local dialects.

PR #747 has recently been created with a solution for locale variants.

Ok so what does it look like?

The first thing to note that all of the below is based on the current PR, which may change by the time it is actually merged in to GlotPress.

Let’s say you have a project called “Labels”, with three locale’s defined:

• English (Unites States)
• Spanish (Spain)
• English (Canada)

One of these things isn’t like the others, but two of them are very close to being the same.

In the above situation, English (Canada) would inherit the translations form English (United States) for any translations that were not defined.

Going to the translation set page you would see something like this:

You’ll notice a new entry in the legend at the bottom of the page, “Root translation”, this indicates any translation shaded in this color (slightly darker green) is inherited from the root language instead of being marked as untranslated (white).

If you select one of these translations to edit you will see the following editor displayed:

Notice the addition of the “Root Translation” information under the Meta heading along with a link back to the root translation.

If you change the translation here and save it, a new translation entry for the locale will be created and the root translation will no longer be inherited.

Looks good so far, so now what?

The PR is mostly complete, however we are looking for some input on one part of the system; the relationship between root and variant languages.

As part of the PR an initial pass at defining the relationships between languages has been made but we are looking for input from the community to ensure they are correct and for any missing relationship that make sense.

One item to note is that root to variant relationships can only go one level deep, so you cannot define a variant of one root as the root of another one.  So in our English example, you cannot do English (United States) -> English (Great Britain) -> English (Canada).  This was done on purpose to ensure translations did not degrade in quality as they moved farther away from the original source language.

The current root/variant relationships in the PR (see the locales.php in the PR for full details) are as follows (the root is the top level name and the variants are in the bullet list):

Arabic

• Algerian Arabic
• Moroccan Arabic

Azerbaijani

• South Azerbaijani
• Azerbaijani (Turkey)

German

• German (Switzerland)
• Swiss German

Greek

• Greek (Polytonic)

English (Unites States)

• English (Australia)
• English (Canada)
• English (UK)
• English (New Zealand)
• English (South Africa)

Spanish (Spain)

• Spanish (Argentina)
• Spanish (Chile)
• Spanish (Colombia)
• Spanish (Costa Rica)
• Spanish (Guatemala)
• Spanish (Mexico)
• Spanish (Peru)
• Spanish (Puerto Rico)
• Spanish (Venezuela)

Persian

• Persian (Afghanistan)

French (France)

• French (Belgium)
• French (Canada)
• French (Switzerland)

Dutch

• Dutch (Belgium)

Norwegian

• Norwegian (Nynorsk)

Portuguese (Portugal)

• Portuguese (Brazil)

Tamil

• Tamil (Sri Lanka)

Chinese

• Chinese (China)
• Chinese (Hong Kong)
• Chinese (Singapore)
• Chinese (Taiwan)

A brief note about the slightly strange English root/variants, English (United States) was chosen as the root due to the vast majority of code that is written with it as the language of the source code.  The root/variants relationships are assigned during the load of the locales file and can be altered for individual sites either through the use of a custom locales.php (using the GP_LOCALES_PATH define) file or through a plugin that hooks in to the GP_INIT hook.

Feedback on the above relationships (or any other part of the PR) is most welcome as always, you can visit the GitHub Issue or PR to participate.

Hello everyone, GlotPress 2.3 was released back in February and in case your were wondering, we’ve been quite busy working on the next release!

GlotPress 2.3.1 has been stable for some time, with the next planned release being 2.4.

What’s been committed so far

Currently committed for 2.4 are the following PR:

• PR660 – 659: Call actions when a translation set is created/saved/deleted
• PR663 – 662: Check the ‘active’ checkbox for new projects by default
• PR661 – 335: Things: Pass previous state to after_save() and *_saved actions
• PR671 – 669: Improve readability of double-slash hack
• PR688 – 687: Allow users that can import glossaries to flush them at import
• PR636 – 628: Support XLIFF tags in android imports.
• PR706 – 703: Make glossary entry highlights case insensitive
• PR705 – 704: Add glossary tooltips after editing a row.
• PR708 – 707: Abort changing status when the translation has be altered.
• PR717 – 699: Fix issue with dismissing warnings would create a “duplicate” entry
• PR715 – 701: Fix entry/display of translations that start with a blank line.
• PR738 – 732: Fix incorrect default in for_export() function for filters.
• PR740 – 732: Make sure to set the default filter on the export link.
• PR744 – 743: Fix incorrect variable name for `German (Switzerland)’ google code.
• PR741 – 733: Add counts to filter links in the translation page.
• PR771 – 758: Make sure to hide the div that jQuery UI creates for tooltips.
• PR746 – 745: Check duplicate glossary entries
• PR766 – 763: Revert any translations changes when cancel is clicked.
• PR777 – 775: Set the initial hidden state for the bulk priority select with CSS
• PR772 – 758: Add styles for jQuery UI’s a11y helper
• PR716 – 704: Alternate add glossary tooltips after editing a row.
• PR717 – 699: Fix issue with dismissing warnings would create a “duplicate” entry
• PR722 – Change string for consistency
• PR738 – 732: Fix incorrect default in for_export() function for filters.
• PR739 – 734: Add ‘ing’ and ‘ed’ to suffix list for glossary term matching.
• PR740 – 732: Make sure to set the default filter on the export link.
• PR741 – 733: Add counts to filter links in the translation page.
• PR744 – 743: Fix incorrect variable name for `German (Switzerland)’ google code.
• PR746 – 745: Check duplicate glossary entries
• PR776 – 776: Add Maltese to locales.php
• PR765 – 764: highlight selected filter
• PR766 – 763: Revert any translations changes when cancel is clicked.
• PR772 – 758: Add styles for jQuery UI’s a11y helper
• PR773 – 749: Translations: Open the first editor if the current table has only one
• PR777 – 775: Set the initial hidden state for the bulk priority select with CSS

These PR’s represent incremental changes and bug fixes over GlotPress 2.3.1.

What’s outstanding

In addition, the following items have been marked for the 2.4 release and are either awaiting merges or PRs.

• IS621 – No information about other translations of the same original
• IS583 – Replace `wp_get_sites()` with `get_sites()`
• IS688 – Introduce new locales and update existing data
• PR619 – Remove invalid ‘me’ language code
• PR309 – Added locales for Papiamento, Papiamentu, Norther Sotho, Maltese, Zulu, Fula (inclusive code)
• IS582 – Modal for keyboard shortcuts
• PR720 – New feature – Add format for NGX-Translate (used in Ionic and Angular projects)
• IS768 – Block adding Glossary Terms containing punctuation with error/warning
• IS779 – String containing two of the same Glossary Term doesn’t highlight/underline the second one
• PR735 – Update Ewe locale with relevant information

Taken together the merged items as well as the marked for 2.4 could support a 2.4 release.

What’s coming up in the near future

However, two significant PR’s are also ready for review:

• PR747 – 226: support locale variants (see a separate post for more information)
• PR784 – 666: Add CLDR support

Both of these have API changes to them and are significant features for GlotPress and should be targeted at a major version release, aka 3.0.

Also in the current 3.0 milestone are:

• PR454 – 452: CLI: Remove deprecated GP_CLI classes.
• IS729 – Misspelled action and incorrect comment in GP_Original::closest_original()
• IS723 – Remove deprecated create_function() calls
• PR627 – Added double quotation marks character to Android escape function
• PR630 – Correct ‘gp_post_string_similarity_test’ action name and comment

You mean there’s even more?

Beyond the above, there are several additional “low hanging fruit” items that have been put on hold pending the new design, which has been moving slower than we would like:

• IS304 – Translation header needs some work, because it does wrap weird.
• IS370 – Show all translation warnings at once
• IS460 – tooltips for “reject” and “add translation” for editor
• IS658 – Make notices dismissable
• IS681] – Copy from original should be a button
• IS684 – Actions div in the translations editor is sometimes too far from textareas

So what’s the proposal?

This proposal is to fold the 2.4 items in to the 3.0 milestone, add the above “low hanging fruit” design issues to 3.0 and assign 3.0 as the next release for GlotPress.

A tentative timeline for 3.0 would be:

• Beta 1: September 5th, 2017
• Beta 2: September 12th, 2017
• RC 1: September 19th, 2017
• Release: September 26th, 2017

There is one additional issue that would have to be opened, as we have merged several PR’s that have an “@since 2.4” already, we’ll have to create a PR to update those items to 3.0. To avoid having to update individual PR’s in the 2.4 tag, the recommendation is to merge all remaining 2.4 items and then just before the beta release, do a single PR to update all “@since” tags from 2.4 to 3.0.

Surly that must be it?

Feedback on the above proposal is most welcome and we will be granting final approval for it at next weeks GlotPress meeting in Slack assuming no show stoppers present themselves.

As always, you can visit the GitHub Issue and PR tracker to participate in any of the above items.