[Qgis-psc] Transifex and translation platform alternatives

[Matthias Kuhn]

Hi Tim, Régis,

Thanks for opening the rabbit hole.

In a chat last week with Harrissou and Richard it was also mentioned that
transifex has other (technical) issues that make it hard to use sometimes
and the option to switch was raised.

I had a quick look at pontoon and I'm not sure it's an option looking at
supported formats [1] which does not mention .ts.
Weblate also lists those formats [2].

The biggest challenge I see IF we decide to switch is to have all
translators migrate to a new platform. It's presumably possible but will
need a good amount of communication effort.

On the economical side of things I would prefer to look at the options
hosted vs. self-hosted side-by-side and budgeting this properly (also
taking into account the initial knowledge acquisition cost of multiple
maintainers, server maintenance etc).

Cheers
Matthias

[1] https://mozilla-pontoon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
[2] https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/formats.html

On Mon, Aug 22, 2022 at 11:58 AM Régis Haubourg <regis.haubourg at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Tim,
> thanks for raising this rabbit hole issue :)
>
> We have currently more than 1.5 M strings to translate, and we probably
> need 166K strings  for 1.5M words to handle growth in the next years.
> I know that Harrissou and Matthias mentioned Weblate as an open source
> alternative.
>
> Looking at the feature grid for Libre projects of Weblate, I'm afraid we
> will have issues with the limit of 10 000 strings to translate. If we don't
> want to host it ourselves, we might anyway have to go to paying plans.
>
> Paid plans for transifex will cost a lot too. I see something between 420
> € to  1200 $ / month at least, and this depends a lot if they count strings
> or words as a reference.
>
> I suspect the economic model of cloud weblate would lead us to similar
> costs.
>
> So, I'd prefer the PSC sponsoring someone to try pontoon or weblate
> self-hosted alternative.
>
> Régis
>
>
> Le lun. 22 août 2022 à 10:58, Tim Sutton <tim at kartoza.com> a écrit :
>
>> Hi all
>>
>> RABBIT HOLE WARNING
>>
>> So I have been looking over the options we have for doing live
>> translations via transifex or other platforms. I discovered here:
>>
>> https://docs.transifex.com/projects/open-source-project
>>
>> that we are not really (i.e. not at all) meeting the criteria of
>> Transifex any more. Particularly this one:
>>
>> "Transifex offers an Open Source Program to Open Source projects that
>> have *no funding, revenue, and/or commercialization model*. The intent
>> is to support *small* and independent Open Source projects."
>>
>> I think we should address this and either a) pay to use transifex or b)
>> look into using an open source alternative like pontoon (
>> https://github.com/mozilla/pontoon/). Pontoon looks great and seems to
>> provide quite similar capabilities for the current workflows we have. The
>> gotcha seems to be they really try to nudge you to deploying on heroku
>> which is yet more managed infrastructure.
>>
>> Another thing we are wondering is if we can find a system that lets you
>> do live translations like transifex does (we don't currently use the
>> feature but it would let us separate parts of the web site into something
>> more dynamically updatable via a CMS).
>>
>> So my questions are:
>>
>> * what do we do about transifex terms and conditions?
>> * has anyone looked at alternatives before and come up with a good system?
>> * is there any interest in us hosting our own pontoon instance?
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> Tim
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Tim Sutton
>> Visit http://kartoza.com to find out about open source:
>>  * Desktop GIS programming services
>>  * Geospatial web development
>> * GIS Training
>> * Consulting Services
>> Tim is a member of the QGIS Project Steering Committee
>>
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