Research translations management tool

[nop33]

We are very lucky to recently have received an influx of contributors who are willing to translate our project!

This poses some new problems:

1. Our translators are not familiar with git and GitHub workflows (PRs, reviews, branches, rebase, merge)
2. Our translation files are stored in JSON format. Our translators are not familiar with JSON and might create a PR with a corrupted structure.
3. Providing translations requires apart from creating a JSON translation file to also update pieces of code to pick up this new file and enable the translation.

Maybe it's a good time to look into translation management tools.

Some initial research:

• https://locize.com/ (free for open-source projects - need to verify eligibility, found through the https://react.i18next.com/ docs, provides awesome integration with our tooling, but I don't like that the content is managed in their servers and not on GitHub)
• https://www.transifex.com/ (free for open-source projects - need to verify eligibility. This tool is used by the open-source project I was working on while at CERN, check out their contribution guide)

My personal requirements would be:

• Minimise time required by devs to integrate new language
• Minimise time required by devs to register new translation strings when developing new UIs (currently, every time there's a new string, the dev needs to create a key-value pair in EVERY translation JSON file, which is cumbersome)
• Provide UX friendly tool for translator who is unfamiliar with git(hub)
• Allow for review workflows
• Host translations on GitHub

WDYT?

[mvaivre]

Thanks for this! 🤙

As a reminder, an initial research was done here.

[nop33]

As a reminder, an initial research was done https://github.com/alephium/desktop-wallet/issues/192#issuecomment-1135881289.

Thanks for bringing this up! I checked all the tools that comment mentioned:

• BabelEdit: I don't see how this meets any of our (my) requirements
• https://localazy.com/: Interesting, to be investigated
• https://poeditor.com/: Very interesting, can integrate with git, to be investigated

[mvaivre]

I didn't feel like this is something we need, as the community was able to contribute nicely to translations. We could close this, WDYT @nop33 ?

[nop33]

I disagree. There were many times that I had to go and clean up their PRs because of broken Yaml/JSON. As mentioned in the issue, translators are not necessarily familiar with git/GitHub/Yaml/JSON (and they shouldn't be, their job is linguistics, not tech). Even though it's not a high priority, I still think it's something we need. I've open to having my mind changed :)