For a long time, we've hosted translations on Launchpad (https://translations.launchpad.net/avogadro) - this has been wonderful, since we've gotten dozens of translation and localization contributions.
Launchpad is not ideal. It's designed around gettext PO files, and imports translation templates (i.e. the lists of strings) from bzr - which doesn't like git submodules.
I spent some time yesterday working on automating updates for Avo2: https://github.com/OpenChemistry/avogadro-i18n
The great news is that using GitHub's action infrastructure, we can build the QM files used by Qt automatically and distribute with all releases.. eventually allowing users to download translation updates as they wish. That repo will now auto-update every week.
The down side is that it's still really painful to get new templates into Launchpad and translations don't sync between branches (e.g., there are different translations between 'trunk' and '1.2' even though they have the same templates)
Last night, I looked around for alternatives and it seems like Weblate would be a good platform for us.
The translation interface is very slick, including translation suggestions from other branches, other projects, and machine translations (Google Translate, etc.)
- It offers quality checks / validation methods
- Fedora, openSUSE, phpMyAdmin, and a few other significant projects are using it
- All code is libre on GitHub and clearly under active development (several major and many minor releases in last 12 months)
- it's possible to do self-hosting
- Directly integrates with GitHub, GitLab and other VCS (i.e., no bzr) i.e., no lock-in
- Accounts are required to contribute, but people can use GitHub and other services to log in
- Translators get credit via Git commits
In principal, we can use the native Qt TS files, but we'll see how that goes.
I've requested hosting for libre projects - and hope to move soon. I'll send an announcement and more information when available.
-Geoff