Use Weblate for translations

[jermanuts]

https://weblate.org/en/ has free libre plan for FOSS apps

[acolomb]

I maintain the Hosted Weblate organization for the Syncthing project. Would be happy to help setting this up within the organization, where it would benefit from sharing translation strings with upstream. We did the same for the syncthing-android/fork wrapper.

[jermanuts]

you are paying for it or using libre plan? afaik, if you exceed some limit with amount of strings you will have to pay (not sure but I know some foss projects that got rejected because amount of strings was too high for libre plan). Addition of BasicSync will not cause any issues also will the author be able to manage it easily? Thank you.

[chenxiaolong]

It's probably been about a decade since I last worked with translation platforms (Transifex at the time), so apologies for some dumb questions:

• Is it possible for Weblate to be set up so that it's synced manually? I'd prefer not to add anything that automatically commits to the repo. Ideally, I could push up the source strings when they change and then pull down translations right before a release.
• If Weblate is set up, I'd still like to continue allowing people to contribute strings.xml changes via PRs. Does Weblate have any way of managing conflicts?

I might be interested in this if the repo can remain unchanged and translations can be synced on demand.

[jermanuts]

Is it possible for Weblate to be set up so that it's synced manually? I'd prefer not to add anything that automatically commits to the repo. Ideally, I could push up the source strings when they change and then pull down translations right before a release.

Yes, afaik, prefer @acolomb to confirm too.

If Weblate is set up, I'd still like to continue allowing people to contribute strings.xml changes via PRs. Does Weblate have any way of managing conflicts?

Why? I see Weblate is more intuitive and everyone should be using that instead of PRs.

[chenxiaolong]

Why? I see Weblate is more intuitive and everyone should be using that instead of PRs.

Maybe it's less of a problem with Weblate, but with Transifex in one of my older projects, I've had people email me patches or create PRs because they either didn't like Transifex's ToS and didn't want to create an account or because their whole country was banned from accessing the site at all.

I'd prefer not to get locked into some platform, even if that platform is pretty open.

[acolomb]

The way it usually works on Weblate is to have it pull changes from upstream automatically by a Webhook on GitHub. Any translation changes are managed in a separate repo there, which can be configured to push back the changes to a separate branch upstream or by making pull requests to your repo, which are kept up to date with new translations until you decide to merge them (or the separate branch). Conflicts may arise if you alter translation files directly before integrating Weblate's changes. But it's just another Git mirror internally, so you can apply standard Git techniques for solving conflicts. You can also choose whether upstream changes are integrated by merging into Weblate's branch or by rebasing into your upstream branch. It should generally handle independent translation PRs pretty well, as long as there are no conflicts with the accumulated Weblate updates. Same as with any conflicting change in Git, just possibly more contributors.

I think we have enough strings left in the Libre plan to accommodate the app. And I can assist with the setup and when conflicts should arise. Permissions to configure it can be granted granularly for this subproject, as long as you have an account there.

[chenxiaolong]

Thanks for the info! Having Weblate create PRs and dealing with conflicts via standard git mechanisms is perfectly acceptable to me.

[acolomb]

Give me a few days to get a component configured for this. It should be straightforward if you followed Android development standards with the strings stored in the expected locations.