Translatability

[Taitava]

I've noticed that Obsidian has an ability to change the language to something else than English. Shell commands instead has all texts hardcoded in the source code.

I'm looking at this aspect from two points of views:

• A user's view: some might favor using an application in their mother language. Nice 👍 .
• A programmer's view: some believe it's cleaner to separate user interface related text from programmatic logic. All texts could be found packed in a single file (per language), rather than spread around the source code. Sounds cleaner, but to me it does not matter so much. It would also add a bit more complexity to the source code when you have button.setButtonText(lang("shellcommands.new_command")) instead of button.setButtonText("New command"). (I don't know yet how translations are accessed in Obsidian, the lang(...) part was just a pseudo code example).

So, this is not something to do soon, but I'll keep this in mind. Maybe it will be towards 1.0.0.

Meanwhile, one of the reasons I opened this discussion, is to see if there is any demand for translations to other languages. Comment down what language you'd like to see this plugin being translated to (sometime in the far future).

I would not be able to translate much myself:

• My native language is Finnish, and Obsidian does not have a Finnish translation (at the time of writing this), so I don't want a Finnish translation for this plugin before Obsidian itself supports it.
• Another language that I know well is English. And this plugin is alredy in English, so there's nothing to do.
• I know Swedish a little, men jag vet inte hur jag kan [combine] ords till [sentences].
• So, mostly the translations would be in the hands of volunteer contributors - which brings an issue: translations should be done only when the texts are "stable" (= when I do not change them all the time, and add new ones all the time).

[Taitava]

And I think the translatability should be limited to cover only the application itself, i.e. do not translate documentation files (but do translate in-app instructions), and do not have discussions here in GitHub in any other language than English. The latter is most likely not an issue, but the former might need a bit of explanation:

• If you browse documentation files* here on GitHub, there is no way to automatically go to your preferred language's documentation file. You'd have to choose a language version every time you want to open a documentation, whereas in Obsidian, you only select the language once in settings, and then everything is in that language permanently.
• When the plugin reaches a stable state, in-app texts should change rarely and new texts should be added maybe a bit more frequently, but not too often. However, documentation files can be far more larger than texts in the application itself, and documentation may update more often than in-app texts. I do not want a situation where a user needs to wonder whether their documentation file is up-to-date, and I do not want to create myself hesitancy to improve (the English) documentation due to the fact that then other docs would be outdated.

*) Currently there is only one documentation file, ReadMe.md, but I might create more files in the future.

[Taitava]

No

Seems that I haven't updated this idea topic to reflect my current thoughts. I just wanted to leave a mark that I'm not willing to plan this anymore.

• I don't want to make the source code messy due to defining texts far away from places where they are used (localization files).
• I hate outdated translations. This could lead me not to improve English texts just because I don't want non-English translations to be left behind.
• Too much work for so little added benefit. The Obsidian community is heavily based on the English language, even though there are some non-English language channels in Obsidian's Discord server. Knowing English is pretty much a requirement if you want to deal with most of the community plugins.