Offering the extension in multiple languages

[seisvelas]

I'm sure there's already been a discussion of this somewhere, but I didn't find it. Please let me know and I'll close this issue.

What are our plans for this?

[tomholub]

This is planned eventually, but not anytime in 2021.

In particular, it would make sense to add languages we can actually speak because we'll start getting support requests in that language.

[drindt]

Ok, i would offer a "German Translation" as we're talking about in our recent e-mail conversation.

[tomholub]

Thank you for the offer Daniel. Hopefully you'll be available by the time we actually get to implement this (which may be a year or two later) - we'll definitely ping you then!

[seisvelas]

Presumably this would also be done for update/confirmation emails, and /account?

[tomholub]

I think the number one place would be when "other" users are involved.

If I'm a foreigner who barely understands English, I may be ok to suffer through setup of software until I get used to it, with google translate etc. But my correspondents may be other people of my language who don't speak any English at all, and I may be hesitant to have them suffer through it.

That means we should first be translating:

• encrypted contact page
• web portal related to password-protected messages

Only then would it make sense to think about translating the browser extension, imo.

[martgil]

We received a user recommendation requesting the browser extension to have a french translation.

reference:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/[email protected]/#inbox/FMfcgzGpGwhzgSgtWzZBFfFjlJQNfGSM
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/[email protected]/#inbox/FMfcgzGrbRcHddJBCfpsLkxPTFqzzksr (the same user offers a helping hand for Chinese translation (Mandarin), in case other users are interested in it).

[tomholub]

We will indeed be eventually adding French translation.

[martgil]

The following concern below expresses an interest for the browser extension to have Brazil/Portuguese language.

Reference: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/[email protected]/#inbox/FMfcgzGqQcmbNkXKDqFdPbwGKdxHNGbc

[martgil]

user's interest in Italian language availability in FlowCrypt browser extension.

Reference: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/[email protected]/#inbox/FMfcgzGrblfMhSzHndwqVLvDKgwvnJfr

[martgil]

A kind user has offered their help in translating the FlowCrypt browser extension into Spanish. Hopefully, they will be available when we are ready to work on adding multiple language support.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/[email protected]/#inbox/FMfcgzGtwDBFlpTvHqrFBcNxlQXrswpn

[pi-2007]

Hello,

we are an international nonprofit and will move towards flowcrypt, luckily I just found out that flowcrypt is English only for the moment, so I can warn my colleagues. From the top of my head we could offer translations for French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Thai, Russian, or Bahasa, but maybe even more languages over time.

I understand it might need some prep-work, but simple things like "reply", "To, "Subject" or "Encrypt, Sign and Send" would be most important as these are the buttons/fields my colleagues will click view/regularly (and not necessarily visit the settings).

so if we can help speed up this feature, please let us know.

[tomholub]

actually that is a fair comment, when trying to internationalise the ui, e we could start with the hotspots - the setup and the most commonly used buttons

[sosnovsky]

@tomholub should we add extension localization in the next milestones or it's still a low priority?

[pi-2007]

it would be really great if this could be put into the next milestone - maybe start with the most important localizations from the user's perpective?

User's are using flowcrypt to improve the overall security and privacy of some of their messages and this process is already very opaque for users. One (simple, I hope) solution to make it a bit more transparent and also improve confidence into flowcrypt about what is happening, would be to show "sign", "encrypt¨, ... in a language which is understood by the user.

[tomholub]

Roma,

my biggest hesitation is that we don't have any translation framework in place, and the attempts that were made were not scalable.

I'd like something as minimal as possible (in terms of included code) that allows non technical people to submit translations easily (we send them the file, they can send back translated one). Maybe one file per translation, maybe a csv or similar. Json less preferred but acceptable.

It would be great if it came with some tooling that could extract the text ids from the codebase and make these empty (or filled, with english?) translation files. A vscode plug-in would be nice.

I'd like it to not visibly slow down the ui.

Once we have something, and it's integrated, adding languages will be easier then.

Tom

[sosnovsky]

Sounds good, then I'll check possible solutions for project localization, which will be lightweight and easy to share with translators.

[ioanmo226]

I have experience in this area and can suggest an approach.

In one of my previous projects, we used Google Sheets as a collaborative tool. We invited contributors/translators to the sheet and allowed them to translate into their preferred languages. To make it easier to track untranslated fields, we set their background color to red.

Once the translations were completed, we downloaded the sheet and used a script (Python/Node.js) to generate localization files (e.g., en.json, fr.json, etc.), which were compatible with [i18n-js](https://www.npmjs.com/package/i18n-js).

With this setup, whenever new text was added, developers could simply update the Google Sheet(Add English texts), regenerate the localization files, and use them directly in the source code.

Let me know your thoughts!

[tomholub]

I'm not too worried yet about the Google sheets part, we could ask someone competent to copy and translate JSON files for us.

The part I was unsure about was which mechanism to use in the app. If you had good experience with i18n then we can use that once we're ready for this issue

We could later start with English and perhaps French if customer is willing to help translating

[ioanmo226]

Okay, got it

[sosnovsky]

Chrome has built-in support for extension localization - https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/i18n
Localizations are stored as .json files and can be retrieved by calling chrome.i18n.getMessage(...)
It seems to be enough for our needs and won't require adding any external libraries.