Thanks to the translation work of many volunteers this app is available in a multitude of languages.
Translation of the text content of the Wikimedia Commons Android app happens on the Commons Android App project on translatewiki.net.
Getting a translator account on translatewiki is a bit cumbersome, but don’t worry you will get one soon:
Commons uses many elaborate terms. Before inventing your own translation for a term, please look at how this term is already translated in the Commons web interface or in the Commons help pages.
For instance, to translate “depicts”, go to https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Depicts and choose your language in the top banner (which says “Other languages”). If you can not find any translation, please do not hesitate to ask at the Commons village pump.
If your language is not available, please crate a new Github issue asking for it, and we will add it as soon as possible. Thanks!
The translations from the translatewiki project are periodically committed directly to this project by the translatewiki team and later released with the normal updates to the Play Store. This means that you just need to translate, and your translations will automatically be used by the app from the next release. Only languages where more than 25% of the strings have been translated get exported.
Translatewiki is configured to export a certain list of languages to a certain file in this repo.
This is defined in their Git repository (Github mirror) in this yaml file (copy at the Github mirror). This file also describes what files contain the original strings in English, adding a new string to one of these files will automatically add it to the list of strings to translate.
You just need to add the new string to app/src/main/res/values/strings.xml.
It will automatically be sent for to the volunteers, and localized strings will be added to the app/src/main/res/values-XYZ/strings.xml files.
Similarly, to modify or remove strings, you just need to edit app/src/main/res/values/strings.xml.
Once in a while, a newly translated language is not matched automatically to an Android locale. That makes the build fail with an error such as values-ks-arab: Resource and asset merger: Invalid resource directory name. When that happens, please submit to Gerrit (not GitHub) a change like this one to add a new line to TEMPLATES>FILES>codeMap.
Here is the current rate of translations for each language.