Translation guidelines

Introducing new translation keys

Decision to add a new key or use an existing one is a careful process. We try and maintain a balance between being specific enough and not overloading translators with many similar keys. A key should be specific enough so a developer can identify to what component it refers. Consider that transifex does not display the keys, but only the translated value in the default language (english).

For future versions of the software (4+) we are leaving the aspect that keys should be human readable (the software will fall back to the english translation, not the key itself).

Updating translation keys

Updating keys should be minimized at all times

Procedure to update a key is:

• duplicate the key for upcoming minor versions (4.1, 4.2)
• remove the duplicated key in next major release (3.0, 4.0, 5.0)

Other considerations:

• Consider that a key needs to be translated again.
• Consider that Transifex does not support branches, patch releases should be able to benefit from upcoming minor releases.
• Before removal, the code needs to be scanned on any occurrences of that key.

Capitals and punctuation

Translation values should include Capitals and Punctuation. Because these aspects may vary over languages (LTR/RTL).

• Do not use CSS to Capitalize first letter of a translated string
• Do not add punctuation in code, eg {{'title'|translate}}: