Revise English and Spanish after iOS Release?

[JJGatchalian]

My name is John Joseph A. Gatchalian. You may know that I already contribute to Soundscape Community, and I'll still contribute to their project. Since I already have a Weblate account, and I did an extensive revision to the Soundscape Community strings, I plan to do the same thing for Scottish Tech Army. These revisions include: changing the Spanish from formal to familiar pronouns and conjugations to match the more friendly tone of the English, remove redundant, wrong, and outdated info in the docs in both English and Spanish, fix typos and grammar, etc. The plan is that I'll start working on this after the iOS version is released. This will strictly be a revision and translation correction service that I'll do for you. I won't try to add any new ideas at this time because I'm currently shaping Soundscape Community's direction. The reason behind this revision and translation is because I'm an assistive technology instructor, and I want to make sure that every version of Soundscape on both iOS and Android is easy to understand for beginners, and I teach Spanish speaking students that have a hard time with English. The problem with the current Weblate policy is that the source English version in this project cannot be edited and remains read-only. Could you please let me know how I could at least suggest the English revisions if the source cannot be edited yet. Probably a good way to do that is to open up a different Weblate fork similar to the way Community is doing. That way, I could revise the English version as much as I want since it's a separate fork. Then the STA team could check over my revisions before committing and let me know if I'm overdoing it. In the meantime, I could work on the Spanish version to improve accuracy to the current English text, as well as redo the conjugations in the Spanish to make it sound less formal. Thanks for your consideration.
J.J.

[davecraig]

Hi John,

Thanks so much for getting in touch, that's a very kind offer indeed and we'd love to have the help. We're moving the Android Soundscape release into production in the next few weeks and in the background we've been working on building the same code so that it runs on iOS too. At some point (a handful of months?) we'll switch over so that the multiplatform version of code becomes our main development path and weblate will be driven from a slightly different set of strings. However, the contents of those strings shouldn't change too much, so perhaps this won't affect any pure weblate work. We'll then have a single set of source code that results in near identical apps on iOS and on Android. This will vastly reduce the server costs as the iOS server is very costly for what it does and the new architecture developed for Android is very low cost by any measurement. At that point we can then get back to working on features for the app(s).

I'll have a think about how best to take suggestions/edits for the English text. I would definitely like improvements but weblate does make it tricky. Of course you can provide new text in a GitHub PR just by making changes in the app/src/main/res/values/strings.xml file. However, that's less friendly if you're already familiar with weblate. I'll take a look at how the Soundscape community folks do this,

Thanks again,

Dave Craig

[JJGatchalian]

I'll help you on this. Here's the link to the Weblate branch for Soundscape Community.
https://github.com/weblate/openscape/tree/weblate-soundscape-ios-app

Now here's the main branch for Soundscape Community.
https://github.com/soundscape-community/soundscape

Notice that the URLs are entirely different and the Weblate has its own fork of the project. I believe that Community had to take a branch from the Openscape project because Soundscape Community was called Openscape before their name changed. Meanwhile, is it safe to work on the Spanish text on weblate for the Android version such as fixing typos and grammar, and using more appropriate word choice for certain terms before releasing the IOS app? Thanks.
J.J.

[davecraig]

Meanwhile, is it safe to work on the Spanish text on weblate for the Android version such as fixing typos and grammar, and using more appropriate word choice for certain terms before releasing the IOS app

Yes, that should be fine. So long as I mark your changes as "Approved" then that should prevent any overwriting.

[JJGatchalian]

Right now I was able to do all I can with the English UK and Spanish strings from the original Soundscape that carried over to this version. There are a few strings such as error messages where I prefer the original text because it's a bit shorter than the current text even though it's a little less accurate to the English. I want my Spanish errors to get right to the point so I can only suggest the change. The next phase will be the brand-new strings for this Android app. Finally I'll tackle the strings that I can't change and only make Weblate suggestions.

[davecraig]

I don't think having a separate weblate fork is the way that we want to do this. Instead I've created a "Source review" team which I've added you to. This has the roles to Add suggestion, Translate, and Review strings. I'm going to go and test the permissions to ensure that this works, but I believe that this should allow you to add suggestions on the English string which we can then approve. It may take me a little while to test this...so bear with me!
Update
Weblate appears a bit broken as it crashes when I try and enable the ability to update the source strings. I think the only other approach which I like for now is to submit all string updates via the "Comment" tab. You don't need to put any text in there other than the new string, that makes it easier for me to copy across and resolve the comment. Let me know if that seems like an ok approach for you. It keeps all the changes in one place and it's easy for me to see new comments and act on them.

[JJGatchalian]

I saw the invitation, but the link is broken. My email says it will expire in 48 hours, but when i clicked on the link, it says "page not found".

[davecraig]

That's annoying. However, weblate doesn't require you to have any extra permissions to be able to comment on strings. You should be able to do that and infinite the invitation failure.

[JJGatchalian]

Let me get it straight here. If I work on the English translation, I could make a revision on Weblate and click on Suggest. Once I do that, then what happens? For now I'll test some changes I could do for outdated info in the English docs, and then I can check back.

[JJGatchalian]

I've just added some comments to a few strings where I corrected some wrong info. Do I have to click on Resolve or just click on Save? I accidentally clicked on Resolve for one of them.Sent from my iPhoneOn May 10, 2026, at 06:07, Dave Craig ***@***.***> wrote:davecraig left a comment (Scottish-Tech-Army/Soundscape-Android#881) That's annoying. However, weblate doesn't require you to have any extra permissions to be able to comment on strings. You should be able to do that and infinite the invitation failure. —Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.Triage notifications on the go with GitHub Mobile for iOS or Android. You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[davecraig]

If you just open the comments, I then transfer the string fixes over to the string and then mark them as resolved.

[JJGatchalian]

I'll give you a warning that when I add quotes to strings with asterisks around it, Weblate removes the asterisks so we're left with the quotation marks.Sent from my iPhoneOn May 10, 2026, at 10:11, Dave Craig ***@***.***> wrote:davecraig left a comment (Scottish-Tech-Army/Soundscape-Android#881) If you just open the comments, I then transfer the string fixes over to the string and then mark them as resolved. —Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.Triage notifications on the go with GitHub Mobile for iOS or Android. You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[JJGatchalian]

I've just added comments to the English and made some actual corrections to the UK and Spanish texts that I could already correct. The rest are just comments. Here are some more corrections that I'd like to make on Weblate, but I can't do them because the passages are too long to fit into the comment field. The phrase "turn-by-turn" is more commonly written with dashes. I believe that sometimes it is written as "turn by turn" with spaces, and why don't we change them to dashes for consistency. Another correction I'd like to make is in the answer to the question "How do i use a beacon like a pro?" The phrase "turning your head in the same direction of the phone" could be either corrected to "turning your head in the same direction as the phone" or "turning your head in the direction of the phone". I chose to delete the word "same" in the UK variant so let's match it in the US variant. Also, there are some more passages that don't contain the asterisks before and after the quotes in some of the UK strings before I started adding comments.

[davecraig]

It turns out that the comment field really isn't the greatest for making lot of edits! I've moved all of your changes across, but it's very inefficient and the problem with the length of the comments and the quotes/asterisk issue means that it's way harder to move across than it should be. However, I've pushed the changes and I'll go and resolve the comments.

There were a couple that I wasn't sure that I wanted. The force close of the app string is a tricky one because on Android there are so many different ways to do it depending on the phone manufacturer. The "top right-hand corner" description for the sleep button I've change to "top-right corner" which I think is clearer.

I'm not sure what your workflow is, but I'm happy to take an edited text file for the US English instead of if that's easier for you. There's no need to make the edits in the UK English as they'll flow through from the US English when I run the translations through the AI step. The Spanish translations you did I have moved to the Approved state and so they won't be affected by that step, or any future changes/

[JJGatchalian]

Shouldn't it be top-right corner with a dash? Sorry I want the punctuation is correct. Now I'll send a text document with all the super long phrases that I want to have changed because of the limitations of the comment field. I won't be doing those redundancy cleanups like in community yet, that's a future plan after the first release. Thanks.Sent from my iPhoneOn May 11, 2026, at 03:20, Dave Craig ***@***.***> wrote:davecraig left a comment (Scottish-Tech-Army/Soundscape-Android#881) It turns out that the comment field really isn't the greatest for making lot of edits! I've moved all of your changes across, but it's very inefficient and the problem with the length of the comments and the quotes/asterisk issue means that it's way harder to move across than it should be. However, I've pushed the changes and I'll go and resolve the comments. There were a couple that I wasn't sure that I wanted. The force close of the app string is a tricky one because on Android there are so many different ways to do it depending on the phone manufacturer. The "top right-hand corner" description for the sleep button I've change to "top-right corner" which I think is clearer. I'm not sure what your workflow is, but I'm happy to take an edited text file for the US English instead of if that's easier for you. There's no need to make the edits in the UK English as they'll flow through from the US English when I run the translations through the AI step. The Spanish translations you did I have moved to the Approved state and so they won't be affected by that step, or any future changes/ —Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.Triage notifications on the go with GitHub Mobile for iOS or Android. You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[JJGatchalian]

Never mind, I checked and "top right corner" is fine, no dash necessary.