Translating Lacona Built-in Commands

[brandonhorst]

As of Lacona 1.0.2, translation is now possible.

Translating Lacona Commands is not only a matter of translating a few words. Because Lacona supports many different ways to say the same thing, and because all languages have different structures for things like dates, there is some additional complexity that goes into it.

However, with the community that has developed, I know that this can be done.

I'd like the initial focus to be on translating the built-in commands:

• calculate
• call/text/email/facetime
• schedule/remind me to
• open/reveal/
• activate/close/quit/relaunch/etc...
• eject
• reveal
• turn on/turn off/toggle
• define
• translate
• search
• play/stop/skip/pause/etc...
• shutdown/restart/log off/lock/sleep/etc...

Into a few core languages:

• European English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Russian
• Chinese (Simplified)

Unfortunately, right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew are not possible at this time. This will be fixed soon.

If you speak another language and you'd like to take charge of adding support, we can probably make that work as well!

In order for this to work, a few lower-level phrases will need to be translated as well:

• dates and times (very complicated)
• numbers (pretty simple)

Very basic documentation is available, but more training will be required before we can start making real progress. But first, I'd love to just get a roll call. Who is interested in getting involved with this process? What languages can you speak? Do you have any coding/development experience?

I'm excited about working on this together!

[mynetx]

German for sure. Coding experience is given in a number of languages. How to get started?

[AlejandroHCruz]

Count me in to translate into Spanish. What's our next step?
P.S. Spanish has several variants too, I'd try to be the most standard possible, but if we want to be more specific: I'm from Mexico.

[brandonhorst]

OK, thanks for volunteering!

The first step would be to read the translation docs: https://docs.lacona.io/docs/advanced/translation.html

Basically, right now, Lacona grammars look something like this:

const MyPhrase = {
  describe: () => <literal text='truck' />
}

We need to add a translations property, so it would look something like this:

const MyPhrase = {
  translations: [{
    langs: ['en'],
    describe: () => <literal text='truck' />
  }, {
    langs: ['en-GB', 'en-ZA', 'en-IE', 'en-IN'],
    describe: () => <literal text='lorry' />
  }, {
    lang: 'es',
    describe: () => <literal text='camión' />
  }],
  // a default describe should be provided in case none of the languages match
  //  usually American English
  describe: () => <literal text='truck' />
}

A good place to start is probably with the lacona-translate command because it is pretty simple.

I am going to keep all translations in separate branches until we are able to translate all built-in commands, because having a half-translated experience would likely be very frustrating.

There are also a few edge cases. For example, lacona-calculate uses MathJS to do its computation, which unfortunately does not have an option for the decimal separator discussion here. So we'll need to be creative with that if we're going to make it work properly. We'll have conversations about this in the individual repos.

By far the most complicated piece of translation is going to be elliptical-datetime. If you're up for that task, open up an issue on that repo and we'll discuss the cases there. Some English-language wordings can be translated, but some will need to be removed and others will need to be added.

[AlejandroHCruz]

I'll dive into it this weekend, thank you!