Adding new translations for i18n

Oppia supports internationalization (i18n) for most learner-facing pages using the angular-translate library, documentation for which can be found here. Anyone is welcome to add new translations, or correct existing ones. For more information about developing for i18n, please see our i18n developer guide.

Contributing translations to Oppia

Thanks to translatewiki.net, it's easy to add or update translations for Oppia! To do so, just follow these steps:

1. Visit the Oppia Translatewiki page.
2. Click "Translate this project".
3. Select a language to contribute translations for. (Also, read the notes below describing the translation formats used for variables and plurals.)

Changes will then be pushed to Oppia automatically by the translatewiki admins (@Nikerabbit and @siebrand), and they will show up in future Oppia releases.

Note 1: Variable replacement

Within translations, you could add variables that would be later replaced with personalized content. For example, in the text

You have 3 new notifications.

the number of notifications is a variable, and thus cannot be included directly in the translation. Angular translate solves this problem by using an interpolation service. Your translated phrase should look like:

You have <[notification_number]> new notifications.

In the html page, the value of notification_number will be substituted accordingly by angular-translate. For more details, please refer to the angular-translate documentation. IMPORTANT: the default mechanism of indicating an expression in Angular is using the symbols {{ and }}, however in Oppia these symbols have been replaced by <[ and ]>.

Note 2: Pluralization

In the example above, if there is only one notification, then we should change "notifications" for "notification". Furthermore, some languages may have more plural forms than English. To handle this, we use a different interpolation service, called messageformat. In this case, the translation should look like this:

{notification_number, plural, =0{You have no notifications.} one{You have one notification.} other{You have # notifications.}}

In this example, the # symbol will be replaced by the value of the notification_number variable. For a more elaborate tutorial, please refer to the angular-translate guide for pluralization.

Manually adding translations

In general, it is better to add translations via the translatewiki UI where possible. However, in exceptional cases, you can manually add a language to the Oppia codebase in three simple steps:

1. Copy assets/i18n/en.json file into a new file called xx.json, where xx is the language code for the new language. You can find this code here. Save the resulting file in the same i18n/ directory.
2. Replace all occurrences of English with the translated phrase in the target language. It's OK if you omit some translations, but please ensure to remove all occurrences of English translations from the file as when a translation key is missing, the English variant will be used as a fall-back. Please refer to the notes below on how to handle variables and pluralization during translation. Please also see qqq.json for important contextual information about what is being translated, and feel free to ask questions on GitHub Discussions if anything is unclear!
3. In feconf.py, add a new entry to the variable SUPPORTED_SITE_LANGUAGES representing the language code and the language name.

After this, you should be able to see the new language listen in the Oppia splash page and translate the site using the language dropdown in the footer.