Hi @Saad! Thank you for suggesting the addition of Urdu. Urdu is typically written right-to-left, right? Unfortunately, Central isn't set up right now to display languages that are written right-to-left. We don't have a timeline right now to add support for languages written right-to-left, but the Central team will discuss more next week, and I'll update this thread afterwards.
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Hi Matthew,
Yes, Urdu is RTL language. It's pretty much like Arabic, and I saw Arabic listed there. That's why I requested that.
Possible to include the translation work earlier than language integration? I see that there are fixed number of translation phrases for every language. I would like to work on the translation part, while you can decide to include the language later on as well.
Thanks,
Saad
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Thanks, @Saad! It looks like we'll likely be able to get Urdu text in once the translations are ready. However, because Central isn't set up to display languages that are written right-to-left, only the text would be RTL, not the layout. We're not sure to what extent that'd be useful and would appreciate any feedback you have on that. Unfortunately, updating the layout would be a much bigger project. We would need targeted funding to take that on, so we don't have a guaranteed timeline on that.
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Hi Matthew,
Thanks. I just want to contribute for my language. Although my current working on ODK is not strictly in this region, still I have been using it for so so long that it would be great to have full Urdu translation/vocabulary readily available for ODK/Central, whenever you wish to use it. I am sure someone else may benefit from this soon.
Urdu pasting in the context of only RTL text and not the layout, is pretty OK. It is pretty acceptable, as people understand the limitation of software layouts. You can build the consensus later on and see when it is feasible to work on the layout. No urgencies from my side.
Have you approved my language request on transifex for me to start the work?
Thanks,
Saad
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Thanks, @Saad! That sounds great.
We generally prefer to avoid variations of the same language. Could you say more about the differences between ur and ur_PAK? What do you think about starting with one of the two?
Yes, I am not really sure about this as well. There should not be 2 variants; urdu_PAK is pretty much standard Urdu. I don't know who suggested 2 different names of the same language and why. In my opinion, you may delete ur_PAK, since standalone URDU should be enough to manage.
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Sounds good! I just added standard Urdu to Transifex.
In case it's helpful, I just wanted to share a couple of examples of what I described above. We should be able to display text right-to-left; however, for now, the layout as a whole will remain left-to-right. Using our existing Arabic translations, the login page would look like this:
The "Set up Backups" popup would look like this:
Just wanted to share these concrete examples of what it will look like to display RTL text in an LTR layout. We're hoping that even just supporting RTL text will be a useful start until we're able to update the layout as a whole.
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We'd love to support Pashto and Dari. You can learn how to contribute in the ODK Central Translation Guide.
