post: Decentralizing Localizations

_posts/2019-04-19-decentralizing-localizations.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Decentralizing Localizations"
+author: "eighthave"
+
+---
+
+App development is already well decentralized, and when F-Droid
+introduced metadata localization, we also made it possible to manage
+[translations and graphics]({{ site.baseurl }}/docs/All_About_Descriptions_Graphics_and_Screenshots)
+outside of F-Droid itself. Two tools, Fastlane and Triple-T, even
+provide a way to sync those between the app source repo, F-Droid, and
+Google Play.
+
+Using [Weblate](https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/f-droid/) for
+handling all
+[F-Droid localization]({{ site.baseurl }}/docs/Translation_and_Localization)
+puts contributors with expertise in specific languages and how they
+should be translated in control of how everything in translated.
+Weblate is the place where translations happen, it is the GitLab of
+languages for the F-Droid community.
+
+We as a community need to avoid putting too much maintenance work on a
+few people so we can keep our "bus factor" high enough to survive all
+things that come our way. People often request that F-Droid handle
+the localization of their app, but that would centralize the work in a
+place where it is much harder to share the workload. So app graphics
+or localized texts should be handled by the upstream app developer as
+much as possible, instead of sticking everything into _fdroiddata_.
+
+That said, there are some apps with localized metadata in
+_fdroiddata_. The graphics and descriptions were added there to get
+things started when the metadata localization was first rolled out.
+Now that we have hundreds of apps that manage their own localization,
+we can move all that upstream as well.
+
+We have also started a project to provide a translated 80-character
+summary for all apps in the archive. So if upstream developers are
+not willing to manage the localization, F-Droid can at least have this
+key piece translated so that users can see screens in only their
+language when navigating the Android client and website. That you can
+see on
+[fdroiddata-localizations](https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata-localizations).
+I am currently managing that, but would love to increase our bus
+factor by getting more maintainers involved there. At this point, it
+is mostly a matter of running some syncing scripts, and checking to
+make sure the scripts did not do anything stupid.