Investigating missing translations in Krita/other KDE-built binaries

[Tyson Tan]

Hi everyone,

For many years, the binary packages we provided on krita.org have been 
missing some basic translations. Notably the "OK", "Cancel" and "Apply" 
buttons. They remain English regardless of what translation you choose. 
However, in a recent investigation, I found out that it's not just 
Krita, digiKam, Kdenlive...literally every KDE application's 
downloadable binary package that built by KDE's buildsystem has the same 
issue.

The buttons CAN be displayed as translated under the following 
condition:
1) GNU/Linux
2) KDE Plasma DE, system-wide locale set to target language (important)
3) The KDE application must be provided by the distro
4) Application language also set to target language (actually, when (2) 
is set, (4) becomes useless on archlinux).

What I've found is that, these missing translations are not included in 
the application's pot file. They are actually scattered across many KF5 
components. Notably:

# kwidgetsaddons
This is the treasure trove of everything with over 500 entries, Stuff 
like KStandardGuiItem/KMessageDialog/KCharSelectData are located here. 
This is the only place you can find strings for: 
&OK/&Cancel/&Apply/&Defaults.

# kio-extras (kio-extras._desktop_.pot)
Holds the clusive "Krita Document" filetype entry in Krita's file 
dialogue. Also holds the names for thumbnail/network types.

# kxmlgui (kaboutapplicationdialog/kswitchlanguagedialog)
Holds the About/Switch Language dialogue stuff for applications that use 
common dialogues, notably digiKam.

# kcoreaddons (licenses/units...)
# kconfig (KStandardShortcut: Open/New/Close/Quit/Undo/Redo/Cut/Copy...)
# kconfigwidgets5 (kstandardaction: &New/&Open/Save &As...)
Although these components holds many basic strings, applications often 
have their own translations for those.

Dispite of this, all KDE-built binaries still include translations from 
non-KF5 libraries. Notably Marble (marble_qt.pot) used by digiKam can 
still display translations properly.

All these make me think that the missing translation issue is caused by 
KDE buildsystem's configuration/script, either the translations for KF5 
is not installed, or they are simply unused.

Those missing translations, although not many, gives an amaturish 
impression over an otherwise professionally translated application. 
Windows/macOS users currently have no workaround to this issue, and they 
make up of the majority of our applications' userbase. I wish we can 
look into this and find a solution, or someone can relay my message to 
the related kdeadmins. On top of that, some guidance could be made to 
help translators finding those out-of-application strings I mentioned 
across KF5.

If this issue should be reported as a bug, please tell me where/which to 
report to. Thank you!

Best wishes,
Tyson Tan