mybuddy/docs/contributing/translation.md

Translation

POEditor

Baby Buddy uses POEditor for translation contributions. Interested contributors can join translation of Baby Buddy for access to a simple, web-based frontend for adding/editing translation files to the project.

Manual

Baby Buddy has support for translation/localization. A manual translation process will look something like this:

1. Set up a development environment (see Development environment).

2. Run gulp makemessages -l xx where xx is a specific locale code in the ISO 639-1 format (e.g., "il" for Italian or "es" for Spanish). This creates a new translation file at locale/xx/LC_MESSAGES/django.po, or updates one if it exists.

3. Open the created/updated django.po file and update the header template with license and contact info.

4. Start translating! Each translatable string will have a msgid value with the string in English and a corresponding (empty) msgstr value where a translated string can be filled in.

5. Once all strings have been translated, run gulp compilemessages -l xx to compile an optimized translation file (locale/xx/LC_MESSAGES/django.mo).

6. To expose the new translation as a user setting, add the locale code to the LANGUAGES array in the base settings file (babybuddy/settings/base.py).

7. Check if Plotly offers a translation (in node_modules/plotly.js/dist/) for the language. If it does:

   1. Add the Plotly translation file path to [`gulpfile.config.js`](https://github.com/babybuddy/babybuddy/tree/master/gulpfile.config.js)
      in `scriptsConfig.graph`.
   
   2. Build, collect, and commit the `/static` folder (see [`gulp updatestatic`](gulp-command-reference.md#updatestatic)).
   

8. Run the development server, log in, and update the user language to test the newly translated strings.

Once the translation is complete, commit the new files and changes to a fork and create a pull request for review.

For more information on the Django translation process, see Django's documentation section: Translation.