About

The Better Fallback application allows you to choose which language to use if the target language does not have a translation yet.

The application allows you to set the default fallback language or create a cascade of fallback languages.

Crowdin has a native feature of fallback to the source language. The reason why you might want to change the default fallback language is, for example, if you are translating from French to English and Italian. If Italian has no translation yet, you want to fallback to English, not French (which is what Crowdin would do).

The cascade of fallbacks is useful if you're translating into many dialects (of Spanish, for example), and there's a risk that one of the dialects will have a delayed translation.

Status of translations

The application checks the approval status of translated strings when applying a fallback, taking into account the configured export settings.

For example, if Export only approved translations (in Crowdin) or Export translations with a specific number of approvals (in Crowdin Enterprise) is enabled, the app will use translations from the fallback language only if they meet the export settings. If no approved translation exists in the fallback language, the app skips that language and moves to the next one in the cascade.

Plurals

Language fallbacks and plurals are tricky. If your file format supports plurals and you have them in the resource file, please choose the fallback cascade carefully, as there's a risk of breaking the resource file.

The problem is that different languages have different numbers of plurals, more than that, if languages have the same number of plural forms, they might mean different things, making your UI look weird.

We only recommend to cascade the fallback languages of the same group to minimise the risk. For example, it's OK to fallback from Portuguese to Portuguese Brazil, but it might not be OK to fallback from German to English and vice versa (unless the risk is acceptable).

Note: The fallback cascade won't be triggered if there is at least one translation among the plural forms of the string.

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