Is internationalization (i18n) planned for Fizzy?

[prenansantana]

Hi team! First of all, thanks for open-sourcing Fizzy — it's a great project.

I'd like to ask if there is any roadmap or plan to add internationalization (i18n) support in the future.

I'm considering deploying Fizzy for a non-English speaking team (Portuguese), and if i18n is not planned, I would consider contributing a PR for that.

Before starting, I wanted to check:

• Is i18n something you'd like to support officially?
• Are you open to a community contribution for this?

Thanks in advance!

[jzimdars]

Hello! We have no plans for adding i18n support.

We've only implemented i18n for one product in our history: Basecamp Classic. So it's not really on our minds.

As I recall, arranging translators was an issue (maybe not now that AI could do it?) and I recall that the developer ergonomics weren't great. Perhaps that's changed in the last 15 years, though!

I can't make any promises but we'd definitely give it a look if someone submitted a PR.

[xavivars]

I'm willing to contribute with the Catalan translation, as well as helping setting up the localizations flow, if needed.

I've been contributing to FOSS translations for over 20 years now, and Fizzy is something I'd like to actually try for a FOSS localization organization 😅

[mbajur]

IMO It would be great if Fizzy had at least all the strings extracted into en.yml, even without the actual logic for picking the locale in the UI nor handling multi language setups. Admins with minimal rails knowledge would be then able to simply translate their fork to whatever language they need and/or switch the language via rails settings if needed

[flavorjones]

@mbajur Would you be willing to start the work to extract the english strings? If you wanted to create a small PR that did it for a single page first, and align on the approach, then perhaps we can get more people to collaborate on the work.

[mbajur]

Exactly what @leehericks wrote - I'm totally willing to do what you requested but only if I'm sure it's gonna be maintaned :)

[jzimdars]

We can't make a guarantee. Even in our own, shaped cycle-prioritized work, we don't make that promise. The exercise of building a feature answers a lot of questions you can't know up-front.

That said, I totally get why you wouldn't want to do this speculatively but if those are your terms, you should probably pass.

[leehericks]

Thank you for your time to consider this discussions. Are we on the same page that no one is expecting 37signals to keep the translations maintained, only the en.yml?

It wouldn’t make sense for you to merge one of our PRs wrapping all the english in t() or changing the text to organized keys if you didn’t want to ask your programmers to do the same in future commits.

[xavivars]

@mydalat seems to have done part of the job already with his "vietnamese" version #2074

would it make sense to ask him to submit the PR and have the conversation based on that?

[leehericks]

I concur. There is a lack of innovative tooling here in Japan and I work at a Japanese language school, so I was considering to take a crack at translating Fizzy to Japanese to give our school some more organization if staff are onboard with using it, but I don't want to extract strings only to have updates overwrite that work. So I think we need to know if the Fizzy dev team wants to implement and keep I18n updated in the future. I know that can be a pain and something better done after an app has reached a level of stability. Basecamp in Japanese would be breath of fresh air too...

[xavivars]

There was a PR that got closed, saying localization as a feature won't be accepted (at least not for now) #2181 (comment)