Moving to Weblate for Translations

krisfremen

Hi there,

I started a thread on Discord to start using Weblate for the translations. So moving the thread to the forums for more visibility and input as asked by @hendrik.

I setup a fork of the repo so I can test the workflows out and have it working in the following:

https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/zettlr/zettlr-krisfremen/
https://github.com/krisfremen/Zettlr/tree/weblate

This will keep the same git workflows, so anyone wanting to continue using that approach for translations can continue to do so, as Weblate will just provide a nice web UI to do the translations for those not as familiar with git.

The Libre plan has 160k strings for the projects as a whole, of which 32,736 are currently used.

On the fork side, I have this set to push towards a weblate branch, and if @hendrik is fine with this, we can keep this approach when we move it in the main repo.
This would mean we can merge this branch into develop before a release.

For git based translations, one approach would be to merge develop back into the weblate branch, or point translation PRs into the weblate branch so they don't clash changes between both workflows.

Copyright/licensing wise, even if the content is in weblate, it keeps the same license as what's specified in the repo, so it would continue to be GPL3.

The trial expires on March 4th, so we'd need to apply for the Libre approval before then. It's a one time approval, I believe it would only get revisited if the license changes to a license that is not open source.

Please let me know if you have any comments, concerns, issues or suggestions around this.

Cheers

hendrik

Since we apparently have little time, let's quickly talk about how to integrate this. So what I would want would be to allow users to translate both via Weblate and via POEdit directly. For this, a custom branch would make sense. This way, we could constantly merge back and forth between Weblate (ingest translations) and Zettlr (export translations) and double-check that nothing breaks. We could also direct users to contribute to the Weblate branch via git (instead of develop), and this way keep the translations in sync.

I would just need a few more pieces of information before we can proceed:

What does Weblate do to the translation files? I saw that it adds plural form configuration. The question is: Does this in any way affect Zettlr? I'm asking since Zettlr uses the bare minimum of the translation system, and doesn't make use of half of the features of gettext, so I'm a bit worried something could break. It's fine if we have to improve the translation feature, but I'd want to know in advance what breaks so that we can check this.
How does the approval process as FOSS project look like? I know that I've been in touch with the Weblate guys years ago, but I forgot what the process looks like. Do you need something from me?
How does the maintenance look like? Would you be willing to help out with this? It seems like a not completely trivial process.

krisfremen

That sounds great.

The plural forms are just part of the language setup, they are only used when the source strings are specified as plural.
Going over the zettlr languages currently, none of them are set up as plural, so this wouldn't affect anything.
From the Weblate aproval page:

Libre project with open-source code
- Translated content has to be released under a license approved by OSI or recognized as libre by FSF.
- All the source code has to be libre-licensed and publicly available in a supported version control system.
- Translations have to be in the same repository as the source code, or under the same project/organization as the source code repository.
- Non-code projects (such as books or graphic content) are also welcome.

Project approval
- Using Weblate has been approved by the upstream project.
- Mention you use Weblate for translations in the README. It’ll attract new translators and also help Weblate to be free for more projects.

Established projects
- The project receives a reasonable number of contributions.
- The project has had active development for at least three months.

Zettlr checks all the boxes above, so we should be good to go on that front, just the following:

weblate branch needs to be created
hosted@weblate.org to be invited to the zettlr repo and given write access to be able to push to the weblate branch.

You can do these or if you want to give me access to the github repo, I can take care of them.

The rest is just submitting the libre approval request once this is in place.

Yes, I'm fully onboard for maintaining and coordinating translations on Zettlr and also the Zettlr docs that we can get on Weblate in the future as well.

krisfremen

@hendrik noticed you made an account on Weblate, invite sent your way.

https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/zettlr/zettlr/ is up and running off of the main repo, locked for now.