@Seddon will update this task

Currently on android translations are added manually by developers into the main branch on a roughly weekly basis and so this isn't a single line change or anything and isn't something we are going to be able to explore anytime soon.

As a stop gap what I might suggest is to run android studio locally, emulate the app and run the script to pull the translations in locally.

I think you misunderstood my request: I don’t mind whether translations I made appear in the next nightly, I’d like to see features enabled so that I can see the messages I translate in context.

(Of course, it would be cool if translations were integrated automatically within 24 hours, partly because it would free up human resources; but that’s another task.)

Ah I get you, my apologies. So I think it entirely depends on when the features finally get merged into main as translations can be requested prior to that step and there might be several rounds of code review, design review etc.

Something I know talked about in passing with colleagues is exploring the idea of more consistently releasing features earlier in their development cycle as "experimental", exposing them in a similar way to how you describe. As I say though, this is just something spoken about in passing and nothing we've set any commitments to. For some features it might make sense, for others there might be little gains in terms of timelines.

Naturally we also don't want to waste translators time. The earlier in the process we ask for translations, the more likely things will change.

Ideally though, most translations should have context provided in the phabricator tasks for a given feature. Those tasks should include screenshots etc that document the user experience. Its the thing that engineers use to build, design to verify or QA to test.

How best to facilitate that is outside of the scope of my role though so its something I'll go back to the team and follow up with them.

In T348245#9270979, @Seddon wrote:

Ideally though, most translations should have context provided in the phabricator tasks for a given feature. Those tasks should include screenshots etc that document the user experience. Its the thing that engineers use to build, design to verify or QA to test.

As a translator, I have no idea which Phabricator tasks belong to the feature I’m translating. I see this: https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special:Translate&showMessage=wikipedia-android-strings-patroller_tasks_edits_list_user_information_dialog_title&group=out-wikimedia-mobile-wikipedia-android-strings&language=hu. This provides 2(+1) pieces of information in addition to the English text I have to translate:

• The message documentation. In this particular case, it says Title of the user information dialog. This provides an exact context, but no broad context. If I don’t know where to look for this in the app, I’m lost.
• The message ID: patroller_tasks_edits_list_user_information_dialog_title. This provides a broad context (I know it’s a patroller task, so probably I have to look for it in the Edits menu or somewhere around that), but helps little finding the task that contains screenshots.
  • Since I’m familiar with GitHub, I personally can also use this message ID to grep for it on GitHub and use blame to find the commit and PR that added the string, but translators are not necessarily developers and may not easily navigate on GitHub (or even know what it is). And even with the PR found, I’m not necessarily nearer to understanding what I’m translating. In this particular case, I found PR #4151, which links to T343287. Zero screenshots, just like in its parent epic T322083. The parent epic has over a dozen of subtasks; there may be screenshots in one of its subtasks, but I have no clue in which.
• +1. If I click the All tab and search for this particular message, I can see the messages in its vicinity. Assuming the messages are defined in a meaningful order (I think the order on translatewiki.net strictly follows the order in strings.xml), near messages can also help getting a broad context, but they don’t help either finding the Phabricator tasks.

Thanks for the extra context!