Use a translation platform

[roipoussiere]

There are many good platforms designed to collaborative translations (such as Transifex), who could really help the translation. Usually, the user subscribe to the platform and select his spoken-languages, then he gets a list of sentences to translate and the text is updated after a peer-review.

• consistency: when a portion of the source paper is updated, translations will not follow immediately: after a while, it will be very difficult to know which part of a translation is up-to-date. Maintenance will be a pain and users could rightly wonder if the translation they are reading is conform to the source. Translation platforms are triggered on update (well, if we correctly configure this) and highlight the portion of text which require reviewing;
• easy contributions: the GitHub work-flow is not really easy to understand for the novice (I mean here: I doubt that one day my grandmother will open a pull request to contribute to the translation), while translation platforms are designed to be as simple as possible;
• maintenance: the online spreadsheet requires maintenance, it could be simplified (and then, more people may find some time to translate ;) );
• no blocking factor: at this time, a user must reserve few chapters in the spreadsheet before starting the translation. This is good for coordination, but there are side effects: if he don't do this immediately (holidays, laziness, ...), he blocks the process for the others and the translation goes slower. A translation tool works with very small part of text (typically sentences) and do not need reservation;
• peer-reviewing: each translation is updated after someone has read and rectified it, this avoid mistakes and really improve the translation quality;
• Sovereign development: I don't know if it's planned but the platform could also be used to translate the Sovereign app in several languages.

The most famous platforms requires payment, but after few researches I found 3 free and open-source alternatives:

• Weblate (repository), based on Django with many DBMS, and supports Git;
• Pootle (repository), based on Django with MySQL/PSQL.
• Zanata (repository), based on Java;

All of them must be of course installed on a private server. Weblate seems to be a good candidate, and you can try the online demo.

If you are agree with this issue, I can install an instance of one of them to a private server as a proof of concept.

Assuming I can prepare a fully working service, is it technically possible for you to host such a service based on Django ? Also, it could point to a sub-domain like translate.democracy.earth.

[domi41]

Weblate looks good, but it's made for .po and .xliff files. How do you plan on making it support mediawiki chapters ?

[roipoussiere]

I have never tested any of these tools, but I see 2 ways to do it:

• 1 The CI server (#210) could split the source file to a list of sentences in order to convert it to several .po files (ie. one per chapter);
• 2.a: then send the diff to Weblate through its API;
• 2.b: OR then force-push this file to a dedicated branch, and configure Weblate to listen this branch.

[santisiri]

@roipoussiere i'm more than happy to configure translate.democracy.earth for this. let me know what you need and i'll help you out to set it up and accept any related PRs.

[ValentinaValentini]

I use Matecat. It supports quite a few formats, is easy to use (online server), and supports translation memories (TMs). Ideally, we should try to build up a DemocracyEarth TM and have contributors enrich it (it's automatic) as they work.