You can help translate RemNote!
Localizing a complex application like RemNote requires a large collective effort. As a startup with only a few employees, creating well-made translations for most of the world’s languages would be difficult. Instead, we allow the community to share their own expertise.
Getting started
Sign in using GitHub. (If you don't have a GitHub account, you'll need to create one to contribute translations.)
At the top, select the language(s) you wish to translate.
If your language does not exist yet, you can select Add Language at the top-right.
Now you can edit the translation! (See details below.)
When you're done, press the button at the bottom to upload your changes. We'll review your translations and eventually add them to the app, if we don't find any issues (this is a process we go through periodically – it may be a couple of weeks before you hear back).
Editing translations
For each text element within RemNote, you'll find a text box in the editor like this:
You can click into the text field and edit the translation.
⚠️ Important: Do not edit the en (english) translations! This is the base language and we manage it ourselves. Your changes will not be approved if you edit the English text.
So far, so good. But what are these?
Occasionally you'll encounter these blue placeholders, which RemNote will fill with text, numbers, or entire UI components when it displays the text. You can’t edit the placeholders, but you can change their position to whatever your language's grammar requires.
The placeholder label will give you a clue about what it's being used for. In the above example, the placeholder will receive a count number – that is, it will say something like “3 Tags” in English when displayed.
You can also look at the translation key for more information about where a string of text is used. For example, SETTINGS.ACCOUNT.ADVANCED_TITLE is a title for the “Advanced” section in the Account section of the settings.
To help speed up the creation of a rough initial translation, you can use the Machine translate button, which appear whenever a text is empty:
Obviously, machine translation will not be perfect and will still require manual editing, especially because the translator is lacking any context about where in the UI these texts are used and what they refer to – but it’s often a useful way to get started, as large chunks of the result will often be reasonably accurate.
Translations are a continual work in progress
As mentioned above, translating an app like RemNote is a large and ambitious project. Most translations will be incomplete for quite some time, and as RemNote changes, new strings of text will be added and old ones will stop being relevant.
Also, we haven't yet made all text in the app available for translation. This is a major effort for our developers, so we’ll be gradually making text translatable over time.
For you as a translator, this means that it’s helpful to come back every few weeks or months and check for any additional text that you can translate.
The review process
Uploading translations will create a pull request (PR) on our GitHub translation repository. This PR will contain a list of changes to our app's translation files. Before the changes go live within RemNote, a RemNote developer first needs to review the changes and approve them.
It may happen that we have questions or require some kind of change to your PR. So we recommend you watch your GitHub notifications for replies. Depending on your GitHub settings, you’ll usually also get an email when we reply.
You can also help us out by reviewing other people's PRs on the translation repository and suggesting corrections or improvements. You won't be able to approve changes on our behalf, but you can still save us time by doing some of the heavy work.
Using the new translation
Once your changes have been approved, you'll find an option to change to the new language in Settings > Labs > Interface Language.