Hi Arjun,
I hope you receive these comments in a positive way, because I can promise you that they have been written without acrimony, since I am convinced that your intention is to help improve the tool.
But I think it is important that we all learn to work in community and that implies knowing certain unwritten rules such as being very patient and always valuing the work of others.
If I’m being picky, I hope you’ll excuse me.
I will go by parts:
I seem to catch in your mail a certain boredom with the times in which problems are resolved. I know that sometimes it can be frustrating, but in a project of this magnitude there are many factors to take into account and sometimes something can seem slow to us, but it is only because it is complex. This is the inconvenience that derives from projects that have limited resources and are supported by volunteers.
If someone wants to speed up the process and doesn’t have the knowledge to do so, they can always hire a developer and contribute your improvements to the community.
By the way, when you talk about the “carryover from June 2021” do you mean this post? PDF Galley Labels
I don’t remember if this is an explicit rule in the forum, but the good practice is that if a comment is a continuation of a previous thread, a new thread should not be opened, but if you do, leave the reference noted so that when we read it we have context.
In your post I have also seemed to detect a certain complaint about the fact that the dialectal variant is made public.
I must clarify that the es_ES translation is done in Spanish from Spain because that is the dialectal variant of the translation team that maintains it.
I bring it to light because of your “know that more people outside of Spain speak Spanish than in Spain itself” because although OJS and weblate allow you to maintain as many dialect variants as you want, no one, except the es_ES translation team, has dedicated time to that, so to date that is the only complete translation in Spanish.
In any case, your claim seems very legitimate to me and I have to say that I sympathize very much with it.
If someone needs a version in es_MX you are in luck because @dagosalas is (voluntarily) working on it but it will show as “Spanish (Mexico)”.
Having said all this (and I insist that it is not my intention to be picky but I think it is good that from time to time we make the “unwritten rules” explicit) I confirm that the two problems you report prevail in the current versions and that work is being done to correct them.
I add some comments on each one to support your position:
1. custom locales: The customLocales plugin only allows you to modify the English version.
I confirm that also in OJS 3.3.0-10 (with updated plugins) the only language that can be changed is English… according to the translation guide (and common sense), that shouldn’t be the case.
It should be possible to keep custom local translations for all languages and have these customizations persist between upgrades (as long as you don’t change the original English string).
@asmecher, I haven’t been able to find any issue on github talking about it.
Should we open a new one to report it?
2. language label: The language label with the dialect is displayed, even when no dialect variants are active.
Actually in this case it is not an error but this is how OJS works from the beginning.
I share with @asabhar that, when there are no dialect variants, it doesn’t make sense to show the language label with its dialect (ie: “Spanish (Spain)”) and only the language (ie: “Spanish”) should be shown.
This same concern has been taken into account and it has been proposed and accepted to eliminate the dialectal variant in the labels when there are no different dialects.
You can read more about this matter in this thread:
I think we didn’t miss anything.
Thank you Arjun for your feedback and for your patience.
All the best,
m.