Translation Management Tools

Thanks, . Can you please file a story for investigating how we can do this conversion? Please make it P2 and tag with for-next-sprint.

React-intl is based von FormatJS which uses ICU Message syntax.

Most translation tools does not support ICU Message format. Conversion is needed, for example to .po format. This needs more some investigation.

In addition to Weblate and Pootle there is a third notable open source translation management platform: Zanata - http://zanata.org/
Zanata has only a few projects that use it.

There are two commercial translation management platforms:

• Transifex https://www.transifex.com/

• Crowdin https://crowdin.com/

Transifex is free for open source software, but FOLIO allows proprietary modules and should allow croudsource translating of non-open-source modules. Elementary OS changed from Transifex to Weblate: https://medium.com/elementaryos/adios-transifex-weve-gone-to-weblate-59870dea06b2

2014 I run Pootle and hbz/GBV did some initial proof-of-concept German translation of the Kuali OLE software; I've also used Weblate. Pootle had some deficiencies regarding Glossary and import/export, Weblate is better.

What do others say?

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/33521
Gabriel Mazetto: "1. Pontoon 2. Zanata 3. Weblate 4. Pootle"

https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag/issues/2511
Jibec: "Pootle, Zanata, Weblate. As seen from my translator experience and what I saw from other projects, Weblate is the simplest one".

https://help.nextcloud.com/t/translations-transifex/149/17
hook: "Having used all three before Transifex, Pootle and Weblate […] My vote in this order – higher up on the list is better: 1. Weblate 2. Pootle 3. Transifex"

My suggestion is that FOLIO hosts an own instance of Weblate.

: I've split off your suggestions into separate issues: ,

Question: Have we evaluated React libraries that consume `.po` files directly so there's no need to have any intermediate format? like `react-i18n-gettext` or `react-translations`?

One concern brought up during the sprint demo was how translations could affect layout. This could be a good use-case for a tool like Percy https://percy.io/ which does visual diffs.

The idea would be to take a snapshot for each translation and make sure that when changes happen, they don't break layout.

These tools look really cool - thanks, Julian! Thoughts on next steps for selecting one?

There are two open source online tools that help translators:

Pootle: http://pootle.translatehouse.org/ Example user is Koho: http://translate.koha-community.org/

Weblate: https://weblate.org/ Example users are Debian Handbook and phpMyAdmin: https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/ https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/phpmyadmin/

Both Pootle and Weblate recommend to use the .po file format because it is the most widely used format and has the best support:
https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/formats.html
http://docs.translatehouse.org/projects/translate-toolkit/en/latest/formats/index.html

There are at least two tools for the conversion between react-intl and the gettool po/pot files:
https://github.com/rubencosta/react-intl-gettext
https://github.com/evenchange4/react-intl-po

Just wanted to get the ball rolling on this discussion. As far as I understand it, the current translation process is pretty manual and something only a developer can do. I'd imagine there are libraries or tools that exist for this kind of thing. Maybe you know of some?