RFC: Move translations to Weblate

[comradekingu]

Undoing the mistake that is Crowdin and its egregious terms and services will bring more languages and better quality.
Volunteering to help set it up and maintain it.

[sonnyp]

After considering various alternatives - I have setup Weblate for Junction and Tangram - as a maintainer I'm very happy with it and can recommend.

It took a bit of time to get to my ideal setup but it was well worth it. My goal was to have l10n as unobtrusive as possible to development. No PRs, commits, ... and to always have the translations on the repository.

Essentially, I setup weblate to pull from main and push to l10, make sure you add @weblate as collaborator to the repo and that you set the merge style to "Merge".

When I'm about to make a release, I git merge --squash l10n into main .

@Rafostar let me know if I can answer any question or help

@comradekingu thank for the NO translations on Tangram and Junction !

[Rafostar]

let me know if I can answer any question or help

Thanks for the offer, I appreciate it. I have set up Crowdin here as I was used to it from previous projects. I do not mind switching from service "A" to "B", as this is a tool that first of all should help translators make their work easier, not mine, as they are the ones using it most of a time :-)

Although I cannot change on a whim. If this change is gonna be actively requested by more people OR persons currently translating will also say that they prefer weblate, we can change. Hence this RFC issue staying open for the time being.

[comradekingu]

@albanobattistella @juxuanu @uniformbuffer @Vistaus @Rafostar @majjejjam
(and 2-3 I couldn't find) are the rest.
Do you all want to move away from Crowdin, and onto Weblate in some capacity?

[juxuanu]

I personally don't care at all. While I rather do MR for big, usually initial, translations (because I use other software for that), updating some strings in the future doesn't get cumbersome in any of the available translation websites.
I'll use whatever you prefer.

[sp1ritCS]

@comradekingu I also personally don't care that much either. I'll just continue submitting MR's via GitHub. That isn't to say moving from Crowdin is a bad idea, given it's nonfree nature (but given, GitHub isn't free either :( ) and the fact that it seems to parse all translation files into their own internal format and spitting them back out, inby removing all my comments and the attached copyright notice (but Weblate might do this too?).

And I've also heard that Weblate seem to be nice working well for various projects under the openSUSE umbrella (https://l10n.opensuse.org).

Also, do I see that right that weblate doesn't offer a free, cloud-hosted version (https://weblate.org/en/hosting/)? Because if I remember correctly @Rafostar motioned on Matrix that he has currently two people donating to him, so 17€ seems a bit hard to swallow.

Additionally, may I ask what your "role" in the Weblate project is, given that quite a lot of issues you opened with your account seem to "shilling" Weblate over Crowdin. Is this some kind of astroturfing or do you really not want to interact with non-free software (but then why are using github)?

[Rafostar]

Also, do I see that right that weblate doesn't offer a free, cloud-hosted version (https://weblate.org/en/hosting/)? Because if I remember correctly @Rafostar motioned on Matrix that he has currently two people donating to him, so 17€ seems a bit hard to swallow.

I did not look into it yet, but I should probably mention that if we want to move to another service, then it should be 100% free like Crowdin is and not have any limits (on both total strings and umber of possible projects). Otherwise my weekly donations (total €0.47 per week) won't be enough to compensate the change.

Additionally, may I ask what your "role" in the Weblate project is, given that quite a lot of issues you opened with your account seem to "shilling" Weblate over Crowdin. Is this some kind of astroturfing or do you really not want to interact with non-free software (but then why are using github)?

That is a very good question. Especially considering that the person mentioned sends over a MR with Norwegian translation, but says that I am forbidden from merging it unless I switch from Crowdin to Weblate.

[comradekingu]

@sp1ritCS
I am a Weblate contributor, and I got a free T-shirt once.
It is where I have landed most of my contributions to other projects, but I have a lot of experience in using other platforms too. This all amounts to €1.1 of donations per week.
If I had any ulterior motives, that isn't a passing grade.
To be quite honest, building and helping the libre software translator community is what I care about the most.

Weblate does accreditation, and doesn't strip the translator fields. Comments are not retained in the actual files, but they can be exported with the database. Comments made in source files are shown as context.
GitHub is actually a functional tool about comparable to GitLab (which I own stocks in).
Given Crowdin is neither comparable nor libre, it is a personal goal of mine to
bring this to the attention in every libre project that uses it.
Every other libre software project either uses the Hosted platform, or has their own instance, with some stuck in old ways. It is nice that such a project exists, but unfortunate that answering the problem of which platform to use isn't more complex.
You missed https://hosted.weblate.org/hosting/ on that page, which is only for libre software.
Crowdin makes a further requirement in that eligible projects need also be "non-commercial".

@Rafostar Never said you have to use Weblate though.
Considering what the terms of Crowdin are, I don't want my work there.
Offering a translation is a fair gesture on my part.

[sp1ritCS]

GitHub is actually a functional tool about comparable to GitLab (which I own stocks in).
Crowdin is neither comparable nor libre

Hmm, maybe you see that differently as a translator, but for me Weblate is also seems like a functional tool, about comparable to Crowdin, with the only difference being that Weblate is free software. GitLab CE is free software, but unlike GitHub it's an extremely laggy mess, because of their decision to do everything client side with CROS requests.

You missed https://hosted.weblate.org/hosting/ on that page, which is only for libre software.

yeah, I only took a cursory look. But great that this exists.

[Vistaus]

As an experienced translator, I too dislike Crowdin for various reasons. Weblate or Transifex would be much better options, but good ol' PR's on GitHub are fine by me as well.