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by adlq 4781 days ago
Great blog post about l10n and i18n! I'm working on improving that process in our company and currently I'm choosing Zanata [0] as a (Java-based) translation platform because out of Transifex's no longer maintained community edition (how unfortunate!) and Pootle, Zanata's installation actually was painless and the community around it is very responsive!

Too bad I didn't stumble upon Weblate [1] first though, it looks promising (thanks onemorepassword).

I've set up an independant "localization server" that executes the following process:

1) Regularly pulls new revisions of the code and updates to the latest revision.

2) A mercurial hook [2] is thus called and the source strings are extracted from the code with xgettext [3] so that new POT gettext files are generated.

3) The POT files are finally pushed to Zanata's server via its API.

We currently do in-house translations for one locale, while others are managed by an extenal translation provider. Employees in our company can just login (Zanata provides OpenID authentication) and collaboratively translate and review the application strings. Whereas Zanata can be used to export ressource files and push projects to our external translation provider's platform via their API.

But as others have said in this thread, l10n automation curently involves a lot of manual code glueing and adapting with your version control system. There's definitely potential since available solutions only address the translation problem and haven't gone very far in the whole process.

I'd be more than glad to exchange about the subject with others who have gone through the same experience!

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Links

[0] http://zanata.org/

[1] http://weblate.org/fr/

[3] http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/Hook

[4] http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/xgettex...