I think it would be a great improvement for Ardour to post its translations on an online translation platform as Weblate.
Having made a whole translation (Basque) for Ardour, there are some problems that might get solved with online platforms:
Collaboration with other translators is too difficult because we don’t have technical knowledge to fetch them or something similar. We’re just translators. This is really easy with online platforms.
Maintaining coherence with used terms is difficult and it’s needed to create a list with them. Online platforms suggest previously used terms, so it’s easy to maintain coherence (and it’s less work because translators can reuse many strings)
Searching for files and executing commands* is not easy for many translators because they don’t have that knowledge, they’re just translators. On online platforms, the only thing to do is translate; no need to update strings by hand, package them into compressed files and submit them. This all is automatically done, or at least once for all translations.
* Searching for and installing dependencies for WAF, configuring it and running it is needed to update strings.
Having explained my ideas, I think Weblate would be a good option. It’s possible to selfhost it.
What do you think about this? Developers? Translators?
Last time this topic came up it was rejected by translators, because one cannot directly test how the GUI layout changes with various translated phrases. The turnaround time to edit/test/edit was significantly higher with online tools. Also Online collaborations lead to inconsistent translations of varying quality, more like a cooperation.
That being said, it’s really up to translator(s) for a given language. We in ardourville make no recommendation about what IDE or editor to use.
If you want to use weblate for the basque translation team, that’s perfectly fine.
What Robin refers to is generally a valid point although several Qt-based apps managed to work around this by making it possible to update translation online and then fetch ready-to-use file from within the program to test the changes. E.g. MuseScore does that.
That said, as a translator, I’m horrified by the idea of switching to an online platform.
Mere two weeks ago, I had to spend hours going through the mess that was introduced by another translator of GIMP simply because anyone can commit changes. In the past 18 years that I’m active as a translator, this happened more that a dozen times, and every time it’s hours of my life wasted.
I mean, look, I’m not a developer, I’m an effin linguist by training. I’m not any more clever than you are. But somehow I manage to get by with simple console commands.
I understand your point, but I don’t feel it so extreme.
Using Weblate should not force every translator to use it, because the always method would still be useful. For some translators and most of all at the beginning translation, it’s useful to build Ardour with the new translations, but it’s not always necessary (specially when there are new strings).
About lack of homogenity, it’s not due to online platforms, but due to not knowing to profit their tools: they have plenty of tools for homogeneity and reusing strings; much more than Poedit or any other kind of them.
About unexpected translations, it’s again not due to online platforms, but due to their preferences: it’s perfectly possible to only let non-approved new translators add suggestions, but not saving them.
And most of translators, honestly, don’t know to use commands, install dependencies… and I say this due to experience with many other translators.
About using online platform independently for each language, I think it’s too difficult for us to mount a Weblate instance, in contrast of the more simplicity to mount it having already servers and domains (and do it once, for every language)
Just my two cents: I also posted a couple of suggestions for better translations here in the past, because I wasn’t able to figure out how to contribute myself directly (with reasonable effort)… A simpler (web)tool would have been very handy for me too…
