Moving translations from Transifex to Weblate

Mutual Help
1

Hello, I noticed that the Android metadata is localised in Weblate, but the app itself on Transifex.

I’d both like to ask why we split translation between two platforms, and propose to fully move them over to Weblate. Transifex is commercial, closed-source, and frankly a terrible website. Slow, buggy, with user experience getting worse by the day.

Weblate is FOSS, just like Deltachat. We already have a presence set up on Hosted Weblate. Wouldn’t it make more sense to use only that platform instead of spreading ourselves between two different places?

I would like to tag the Weblate maintainers here in case they have more context, so forgive me if I get the syntax wrong, this is my first post here. @link2xt @adbenitez @Hocuri

5 Likes
2

Transifex used to be open-source, with the same freemium structure as Weblate. This was the case when it was chosen by Merlinux as Deltachat’s translation platform. Transifex then closed their source and made it harder to switch away from them. AFAIK, there is no reason to think that Weblate will not do the same at some future date. This process in called en :poop: tiffication.

Switching platforms would be a lot of work for the devs. I would only support switching to a platform that is democratically governed by its users, with a solid constitution that will resist such sell-outs. Otherwise it’s just running on a treadmill.

1 Like
3

Some further information (emphasis mine):

Transifex offers an Open Source Program for Open Source projects with no funding, revenue, or commercialization model. The intent is to support small and independent Open Source projects. […] select “My project is a non-commercial Open Source project”

Experience about such a migration:

Concerns:

3 Likes
4

Interesting info and well-founded concerns. Weblate has self-hosting of instances, so the project could in fact be completely sovereign and democratic if that self-hosting was within our reach (i have no reason to assume it’s not viable). For example, stoat chat self-hosts their Weblate over at https://translate.stoat.chat/ , it is completely independent of the Weblate Hosted website with 100s of projects that would be threatened if weblate enshittifies.

1 Like
5

If enough people are self-hosting implementations, then an open-source fork can win out if the original provider tries to close the source:

But note the scale of the effort it took here; Amazon threw its weight behind a fork.

Self-hosting would be an extra ongoing burden on the devs, unfortunately, effort that might be better spent on other things.

Another approach is to use a solidly democratic third-party host, maybe something like the Weblate-based https://translate.codeberg.org/. But even a migration to such a host would presumably be a lot of work; I’m not sure how much labor, or how skilled it would need to be.

6

I fear I’ve been unduely negative here. Centralized platforms with significant switching costs are social traps, so they tend towards wielding monopoly power over users. This goes for social media too (including Bluesky, which has intrinsically centralized components).

I do strongly support projects and contributors getting and staying free of such monopolies, using open standards and democratic platform governance. I also acknowledge the significant switching costs, and the way they tend to increase over time.

Maybe we could do Git and translations over Deltachat? This might also make it easier for those under censorship to contribute their coding and language skills. There are already e-mail Git interfaces (and Weblate is Git-based, tho I don’t think Transifex is). So doing this via a bot seems possible. DC is properly decentralized, so this might be a more productive way to use effort.

Related: