Howdy, Journalers! I'm very excited to announce a couple of things as the Journaly platform continues along into new stages of its beautiful product journey β¨
1. Journaly Is Now Available In Mandarin Chinese! π
Firstly, I'm very happy to announce that the entire Journaly User Interface is available in both Simplified and Traditional Mandarin Chinese! It was important for us to take the extra time and care to support both of these and ensure a beautiful, comfortable experience for everyone who may want to use the interface in Chinese. In case anyone is unfamiliar with this functionality, you can manually switch the U.I. Language from the Settings page under UI Language.
While this is primarily so that Journaly can be inclusive and provide a great experience for as many users as possible in their native language, rather than only providing an English interface, I love that on Journaly this can also be a very cool feature for people who might want to have fun displaying the interface in their Target Language(s) - cough cough LindasLanguages xD
A huge thanks to Harper-Tan for the amazing work translating everything! ππΌππΌππΌ
2. Expanding Our U.I. Translations
We built Journaly from the very beginning with all the infrastructure in place to support being able to display the User Interface in many languages. Even when we only had English support, everything was in place to expand this with great ease once the time was right, rather than requiring a huge refactor to add in that functionality later.
You have probably all seen that we support writing in a massive number of languages, ranging from the most widely spoken and commonly learned to endangered and even constructed languages. Along with this philosophy of wanting to support writing in any language you want, we also want to make sure that nobody is excluded from the best experience using Journaly no matter what language(s) they speak.
3. This Is Also A Journey
While we took the strategic approach of building Journaly with that (i18n) infrastructure from day one, we also had to be equally strategic about actually expanding the number of supported UI Languages. We have been improving Journaly at such a fast and consistent pace that if we translated the UI into lots of languages too early, those translations would be constantly going out of date and it could get very messy, very quickly. We added German support quite a long time ago thanks to the absolutely amazing help of @LindasLinguas who has also been constantly helping us keep the German translations updated as things have either been changed or added.
All that said, I believe that Journaly has now finally reached a stage where β while we are still constantly adding features, improving existing functionality, and fixing bugs β the platform has really stabilized a lot, and so I think it's finally time to add a few more languages π
We have actually built our own internal tools to make this easier for the community to contribute to, but those still need a little more polishing before being fully operational. In the future, we want to make it incredibly easy and intuitive for anyone to see exactly what translations are missing or out-of-date, and to contribute translations seamlessly.
For now, though, I would love to see if any of you are willing to help us translate Journaly into a few more languages. We currently have an amazing volunteer translating everything into Italian, and we have partial translations for Spanish that I would love to have reviewed and completed. If you could comment down below with the language or languages you are willing and comfortable translating into, that would be amazing β€οΈ
Thank You All, As Always
I just want to thank you all once more for being here right now. I think it's so cool that you are all here at this early stage of the Journaly platform. This is a particularly exciting time to be here with us, because so much of the foundational work is done now β the insanely huge gigantic massive projects that built the foundational functionality and set of features you see today. From here on out, we can actually spend way more time building new exciting features that you will love and making all the existing features work better and better β I think you're going to absolutely love it :)
Hey, Robin! It'd be a pleasure for me to help a little with the Portuguese translation, as I'm Brazilian. And I'm looking forward to the future of Journaly :)
Hello Robin! I helped with the Spanish translation of the UI months ago, and Iβd love to give you a hand to check if everything is all right, to correct out-dated terms or to translate new features!
I'm a bit confused: What happened to that online (I think it was Google) sheet page? I'm guessing it's outdated due to the reasons you mentioned in the post? (I'm confused because I don't find any of that information in the static/locales folder, but maybe it's indeed better to start anew).
I'd review the Spanish translations and, obviously, volunteer to translate the whole thing into Catalan. If you want, I could issue a pull request with the translated JSON files. Once I get to it, that is, since I'm still quite busy with you-know-what.
@Nori that would be amazing, thank you! I will contact you soon with details on how we can proceed with that π
@Enchu-Ferrari Ah yes, thanks so much for that initial help on the Spanish translations! I'll send you an email regarding continuing on with this work, that would be amazing π ππΌ
@edufuga The Google Sheet page was (a) a very simple way for us to initially start collecting some translations before we built our translation tools (the ones mentioned above that need a bit of polish before being fully operational to the public) and (b) a bit of an experiment.
In the end, it was a little messy and hard to keep up with. The translation tools we built, for example, track the % of completion, % untranslated, and - very importantly - % outdated. I'm looking forward to getting those fully operational as it will be wonderful for any Journaly user to be able and empowered to contribute as much or little as they want anytime.
Regarding the translations, thank you very much for volunteering! Since you're still a bit busy at the moment and @Enchu-Ferrari volunteered for Spanish, maybe we can have Enzo take a look at those for now and once you are ready, a Pull Request with the translated JSON files in Catalan would be amazing π It would be great fun to see the Journaly interface in Catalan β¨
Hi, Robin! What would you say about the Polish translation? I'd be happy to contribute to the project π
Hi Robin! I am a native Arabic speaker! I might can help with Arabic! It depends on the skills you need and on my free time! I also speak French but am not a native speaker.