My changes in translation did not survive an upgrade

[Firelord Azula]

Good evening, I need an advice on what to do.

 

For years our community (which previously was owned by a different person) used a ready language pack, which had a professional translation, and it was great.

This language pack was abandoned by its developer on 4.6.3 version.

I heard that there soon will be upgrade to 5.0 version or something, so I was worried that after that we can get bugs because our language is so horribly outdated. So I installed another ready language pack, which is supported by its developer.

Turned out this translation is really messy, some lines are translated outright wrong, so I don't liked it and decided to fix it. I spend a lot of time to compare both translation, I changed 100+ lines in standard editor and I was still in the beginning, I completed like 10% or less of the whole language (so the final changes probably would count to a thousand lines).

Then I had to upgrade it to 4.7.11 and now all my changes are gone, because I did not create my own language, I did it inside the translation.

 

What should I do? I would like to use a pack which keeps up with all the upgrades to avoid bugs and problems, but I need to keep certain lines translated by me.

Are there any way to save certain lines separately from the pack and made them override the pack translation?

Because in other way it seems I had to change the lines manually after every upgrade, but it takes too much time.

I suppose if I copy this pack and made my own changes in the copy, my copy will be 4.7.11 forever, so eventually it became as outdated as an old pack 4.6.3 is. So basically it the same thing, though I can just keep a list of changes I've made and manually change it after every 6th upgrade (so twice a year), but again, it takes a few days of time, which is too much.

I see the packs can be exported and imported, so probably I can write an Excel macro to automatically fix the lines I need, but I'm too afraid to accidentally break the .xml file and broke my forum again, like it happened after I installed something from Marketplace. If there's any way to do it without breaking, please tell me in all the details.

Another opportunity is to give up, use the messy translation, and fix only the most horrible lines, but the task of doing it every month is still upsets me.

Or stick to outdated 4.6.3 pack. But I suppose it's a bad idea because of the bugs. Or am I wrong?

 

Please help!

[Marc]

On 7/2/2023 at 3:26 PM, Firelord Azula said:

Then I had to upgrade it to 4.7.11 and now all my changes are gone, because I did not create my own language, I did it inside the translation.

The question here is where exactly are you changing these? Translated items, unless there is an update to a language string and the item is removed, would be maintained between upgrades unless otherwise stated.

It does need to be noted, version 5 is a major update, so its very likely you would need a new pack

[Firelord Azula]

10 hours ago, Marc Stridgen said:

The question here is where exactly are you changing these? Translated items, unless there is an update to a language string and the item is removed, would be maintained between upgrades unless otherwise stated.

I did it inside the translation pack in the standard editor, I had two packs, old 4.6.3 (default) and (then) 4.7.10 (visible to everyone, but not default). I went to AdminCP -> Customization -> Languages -> [4.7.10 language pack] -> Translate.

Then I updated the system to 4.7.11, and the developer also released an update from 4.7.10 to 4.7.11 for that language pack. I thought it will not affect my changes just like the system upgrades so far are not affecting my two additional lines in the CSS of default (light) and night theme. But it seems to me that language update compared all lines of my installed 4.7.10 pack and newer 4.7.11 release, and then changed all lines that were different in translation to newer version, so all my hard work got overwritten.

This is probably not the developer's fault, I guess it's done this way to fix errors in translation with updates, but if an upgrade process can't see the difference between the line which was never touched by user (the developer changed the translation in the pack), and the line that was changed by user (the developer never changed it), than I don't know how to keep my changes between updates...

 

What should I do?

Edited July 4, 2023 by Firelord Azula

[Marc]

If you are installing an update to a language pack, it will indeed overwrite any changes you are making, as its updating them with what should be the correct ones. The only way would be to reapply any manual changes you are making