Transifex alternative for translations?

[Dunedan]

I recently started to do some translation work for 0 A.D. While I had a high opinion of Transifex before, I quickly realized that it has a major shortcoming:

When doing the translations, I noticed that lots of strings which were already translated in the past and do for example show up translated in Alpha 26, wouldn't show up as translated in Transifex. I was quickly able to track that down to https://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/27786, which replaced the regular white space in "0 A.D." with a non-breaking one. While a valueable change, that erased hundreds of translations as Transifex doesn't support fuzzy translations (https://help.transifex.com/en/articles/6220794-gettext-po#h_c820bfaa77). That means whenever somebody changes an untranslated string and be it such a tiny change, the whole translation gets wiped out and the translators don't even get the previous translation shown to adapt it. That's really annoying and results in a lot of unnecessary work.

So I was wondering if we should look for an alternative to Transifex which does handle that better. Does somebody have experience with other web-based (preferably Open Source) translation tools? Any other idea how we can mitigate this issue?

[Stan`]

Yeah the non breaking space change has caused a lot of issues sadly.

Since you're looking into it you might want to merge the following PR in SVN -> https://github.com/0ad/0ad/pull/44

7 hours ago, Dunedan said:

wiped out and the translators don't even get the previous translation shown to adapt it.

Don't you have suggested translations or something, still ?

7 hours ago, Dunedan said:

So I was wondering if we should look for an alternative to Transifex which does handle that better. Does somebody have experience with other web-based (preferably Open Source) translation tools? Any other idea how we can mitigate this issue?

I had a quick look it seems Blender uses Weblate, while Supertuxkart and Widelands use Transifex, Wesnoth uses github repos (which IMHO is a no no). I don't think we should switch for the following reasons:

1. Self hosting sounds like it would be an additional pain
2. So far we had a constant influx of translators due to the Transifex visibility, we might lose that by switching platforms.
3. We might lose actual translators doing the switch (and we might gain new ones going FOSS but usually that doesn't even out)

EDIT: There was one user of Mastodon that suggested another alternative, but I can't find it anymore it seems they deleted their toots.
 

[Dunedan]

47 minutes ago, Stan` said:

Since you're looking into it you might want to merge the following PR in SVN -> https://github.com/0ad/0ad/pull/44

I actually would want to improve quite a few strings, however as that wipes out the existing translations on every change, I'm not sure if that's a good idea. That's especially a problem for languages without much translation activity.

49 minutes ago, Stan` said:

Don't you have suggested translations or something, still ?

Yes, the suggested translations also seem to include translations of strings which don't exist anymore. I noticed that only after writing this post. However, that still just a workaround and requires translators to actively check the suggestions, but it's better than nothing of course.

57 minutes ago, Stan` said:

I don't think we should switch for the following reasons:

1. Self hosting sounds like it would be an additional pain
2. So far we had a constant influx of translators due to the Transifex visibility, we might lose that by switching platforms.
3. We might lose actual translators doing the switch (and we might gain new ones going FOSS but usually that doesn't even out)

I agree with all of that, but getting translations constantly wiped is a pretty big downside in my opinion, so I was wondering if there are alternative solutions which might have less downsides. If there are none, well, that's how it is then.

[Stan`]

36 minutes ago, Dunedan said:

I agree with all of that, but getting translations constantly wiped is a pretty big downside in my opinion, so I was wondering if there are alternative solutions which might have less downsides. If there are none, well, that's how it is then.

I don't know the state of the art for translations maybe there are options. Maybe in case of such string we could automatically update the translations if possible.