MissingTranslation Errors after Upgrading to Gradle 3.3

Question

Since upgrading to Gradle 3.3 I'm having trouble building my code due to missing-translation errors:

Error: xxx is not translated in "af" (Afrikaans), "am" (Amharic), "ar" (Arabic), "az" (Azerbaijani), "az-AZ" (Azerbaijani: Azerbaijan), "be" (Belarusian), "bg" (Bulgarian), "ca" (Catalan), [...], "zh-TW" (Chinese: Taiwan), "zu" (Zulu) [MissingTranslation]

The majority of the reported languages are those supported by a 3rd-party module included in my project, and it now seems to define the supported languages for the entire project, giving me this kind of error for all strings that are not translated into above languages. Before upgrading to Gradle 3.3 this was not causing any problems.

I considered the following solutions:

1. Remove surplus translations from other modules. I want to avoid that because those modules are external and needlessly altering them would really hurt maintainability of my project.
2. Disable the "incomplete translation" Lint inspection - the most common suggestion for similar questions on SO. This is sub-optimal because I want to be made aware of translations that are missing in my code (working so far). Besides that, disabling the check does not get rid of the error.
3. Define the supported configurations in build.gradle as described in this answer. I like this option (specifying languages instead of relying on translations available in the modules), but it also does something strange: I'm getting missing-translation errors for strings that are marked translatable = false.

For now, I'm downgrading again to the previous Gradle version. But what is the best apporach for fixing these build errors?

Answer 1

Hoping that there might have been corrections since I posted this question a few months ago, I checked the situation.

It seems that the issues were introduced with the Gradle plugin 2.3.0 and not Gradle 3.3 itself as I suggested in the question. Downgrading the plugin avoids the errors but can hardly be a long-term solution.

I found that option 3 in the question is the best way to handle it: add this to the app's build.gradle:

android {
    defaultConfig {
        ...
        resConfigs "en", "fr"
    }
}

This is described in Googles documentation and, as mentioned, also in this answer. It removes all unnecessary resources - and the warnings/errors along with them.

Quoting the documentation:

The Gradle resource shrinker removes only resources that are not referenced by your app code, which means it will not remove alternative resources for different device configurations. If necessary, you can use the Android Gradle plugin's resConfigs property to remove alternative resource files that your app does not need.

For example, if you are using a library that includes language resources (such as AppCompat or Google Play Services), then your APK includes all translated language strings for the messages in those libraries whether the rest of your app is translated to the same languages or not. If you'd like to keep only the languages that your app officially supports, you can specify those languages using the resConfig property. Any resources for languages not specified are removed.

The "false positives" (missing translation error for a non-translatable string) I got were for strings that were defined in more than one module. Renaming the strings or providing translations for them solved the problem. This, too, seems to be introduced with Gradle plugin 2.3.0.

Answer 2

In build.gradle add below code

lintOptions {
    disable 'MissingTranslation'
}