What's the best way to programmatically fetch (and write) customized text strings for translations?

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The discussion revolves around programmatically fetching and updating translated text strings in Discourse. mattdm seeks an automated way to sync English text updates from the admin interface with translations via Weblate. Danielle explains that the current API has limitations, returning only a fixed number of translation overrides, and suggests an integration using the API. gerhard clarifies that the process can be stateless: polling the /admin/customize/site_texts.json endpoint with a locale and page parameter retrieves translations, and updates are made via a PUT request to /admin/customize/site_texts/<id> with form data including the translation and locale. The approach mirrors the admin interface’s API calls.

1

I have used the web admin interface to change quite a few Discourse strings. Out of expediency[1] I have ignored the non-English versions. This means, of course, that they’re out of sync.

In Fedora, we use Weblate for community-powered translations. (See https://translate.fedoraproject.org/). I’d love to hook this up, ideally so that there’s an entirely automatic workflow where when a string is updated in English via the admin interface, it is sent to Weblate, and when there is a translation, it comes back.

What’s the best way to accomplish this?

  1. laziness. ↩︎

4

Implementing an integration using our API where you would:

  • Poll Discourse for new overrides (no webhooks)
  • Push new translations from Weblate into your Discourse site.

That’s the preliminary rundown. We’re looking into quantifying the existing limitations, as our current API returns only a fixed amount of translation overrides. Which means we would need to make changes to that API endpoint to make it work.

5

Polling seems fine — translation won’t be instant anyway. But does the polling thing need to keep track in some way? It’s nice when it can be stateless…

8

There’s no need to keep track of anything on your site. You should be able to implement it stateless.

  • For polling, you need to send a GET request to the following path on your site:
    /admin/customize/site_texts.json?locale=en&overridden=true&page=0

    Adjust the locale parameter to your needs. The API returns up to 50 results and supports pagination (page parameter).
    The JSON will include { "extras" : { "has_more" : true } } when there are more results.

  • Updating a translation override works by sending a PUT request to the following path:
    /admin/customize/site_texts/<id>

    Replace <id> with the ID of the string you want to translate, e.g. “js.user.username.instructions”.

    The payload of the PUT request must be form data (Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8) and must include the following attributes:

    • site_text[value]: the translation
    • site_text[locale]: the locale, e.g. “en”

Essentially you need to use the same API calls that the Customize Text admin interface uses.