Mobile i18n Technical Approach

Dec 1, 2023 Meeting Notes

Understand existing tools for translation and technical approach for Atlas
Align on goals for mobile approach
- Consistent translations for iOS and Android
- Integrate with existing processes and tools like Transifex
- Leverage work of the Translations working group
Approach alignment
- Should we have a single format so we can share translations between apps?
  - This would be a consistency win
  - Would require developing new tooling
  - Was a goal of the edX mobile team, but not done yet.
  - @Volodymyr Chekyrta is aware of differences in the way that plurals are handled
  - Trying to combine string would add some complexity, @Brian Smith argues for keeping them separate
  - @Mian Khalid notes that separation double the cost of translation
  - https://help.transifex.com/en/collections/3519116-file-formats
  - Try a spike to see if we can make this happen?
    - Probably investigate plurals issue before diving too deeply.
    - There’s this article about a possible approach, https://phrase.com/blog/posts/how-to-share-translations-between-ios-and-android/
    - @Brian Smith suggests using one of the native formats
      - However, this creates a dependency between the apps that is new, if we, say, choose ios, the string would have to exist there to be available in Android.
    - There will be product specific strings.

It does seem to be possible to get translations in different formats using tx pull, but it’s not clear if it’s possible to pull down the source strings in different formats (Using the client )
There is also https://pypi.org/project/transifex-python/ Python
API docs make me think it might be possible https://transifex.github.io/openapi/index.html#tag/Resource-Strings/paths/~1resource_strings_async_downloads/post
- It’s not clear what happens if the post to resource_strings_async_downloads has file_type in attributes that doesn’t match the uploaded source