Moving to Weblate?

[elegaanz]

I personally don't really like Crowdin¹ :

• it is not open-source/free/libre
• the CLI tools to manage translations are not that good
• I often receive private messages proposing to translate Plume in exchange of some money. I'm not against paying contributors, but I don't really like people who don't care about the project getting money out of it (if you are a translator and you want to get some money, I can add you to the Liberapay team).
• They more or less said to one of our contributors that their account will be closed in a few month, unless they start paying for a premium plan. I really don't like that.

And we now have the possibility to have an Weblate instance hosted for us, by some people who want to help the project, so I would like to ask all the translators if they would prefer to stay with Crowdin or to switch to Weblate.

The only feature Crowdin has that Weblate doesn't, is in context translation, that we are using on https://translate.joinplu.me and https://translate.docs.joinplu.me, but I don't know if these sites are really used? So little poll: did you already used them?

1: When choosing a translation platform, I compared the different solutions that were available, and it seemed to be the least bad, I didn't especially liked it at that time either. And I couldn't host Weblate or something else on the small server that powers https://joinplu.me.

[ahangarha]

I strongly support this suggestion. FLOSS projects deserve to get contributions on FLOSS platform. Not just for translation, I hope the repo also move to gitlab or gitea.

[requiem958]

I support this change too, crowdin seems to have a good IHM. More, it seems we can translate without an account, maybe this Will attract more contributors. I personally not use the context translation, so no loss.

[trinity-1686a]

Not just for translation, I hope the repo also move to gitlab or gitea.

As a matter of fact, there is a gitea server which should one day host Plume development, the migration has just never been done

[elegaanz]

If we can do the migration to gitea soon, I would like to. Is there anything blocking us?

[splacat]

In the past I was translating Catalan to Mastodon project via Weblate until some troubles with Weblate forced developers to move to Crowding. I’m used to Crowdin now but anyway, choose the translating platform you like most.

[elegaanz]

Do you know what the troubles were exactly?

[splacat]

See this thread:

https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/10385

[elegaanz]

Thank you. Seems like a specific moderation problem, and we shouldn't have the same issue since we don't grant automatic rewards to translators, and because Plume is much "smaller"/less known than Mastodon, so less people are likely to abuse the system.

[verymilan]

I have been asked for an opinion, but I am not sure if i can say anything of value... if Crowding randomly tries to charge contributors like this, it definitely loses points. Technically i have adapted to it quickly when i did the recent submissions. I cannot say anything about Weblate, i don't recall using it, but i think that i have read its name often.

If it doesn't bring us downsides (do we know that Plume won't grow significantly and won't offer rewards in the future?), or any kind of extra barriers, i'm fine with you changing platforms.

[meneer]

Apart from all governance related issues, I was quite pleased with using the mobile browser based webclient. Translating all text strings was really very efficient. But since I'm at 100% done now, moving to another platform would not bother me a lot. Most translators are used to switching :)

[xmgz]

Do what you consider best for the project, might be technical and ethical issues involved. I personally prefer weblate tho.

[musicsd]

zanata also looks good.

[igalic]

thanks for the link @musicsd, (n.b. i edited your post to make it a link, for people who only use github on the phone, with one hand, while running after a screaming child and might have trouble copy pasting)

i wasn't aware that there was more than one open source translation software!

the main reason for weblate, other than being open source, also fell because we were offered hosting of it.

we don't have the enough resources (hardware, time, skill) to admin software (that we didn't write ourselves;), so that offer was very welcome.

now the question is what our translators think!

[xmgz]

zanata also looks good.

I respect your opinion, but in my experience zanata was a pain in the a**. Excuse my rudeness, no offece to you :*

I say "was" because I don't use it since framasoft had some project there (peertube?) and it might be that zanata has got better, from a translator POV was not friendly. Since plume is not a big project (translating wise) would not be a big issue.

My two cents for weblate. Have you contacted with hosted.weblate.org?

[mecqor]

Sorry it's irrelevant, but please transfer your code to GitLab as well. Thank You

[fitojb]

I would support the move as well.

[elegaanz]

Sorry it's irrelevant, but please transfer your code to GitLab as well. Thank You

It is not really relevant to this issue, but we are going to move to Gitea : https://git.joinplu.me/Plume/Plume

[ahangarha]

As translator, I have used Weblate and I was satisfied.
Just sharing

[KitaitiMakoto]

I also support this suggestion.

To be fair, I used in context translation for Plume docs and I feel it's great. But Weblate is also good as I use is for Lemmy translation.