Tldr: Decide on a free web hosted translation service

[sbrl]

We have been talking about using a hosted service to ease translations for a while. After a chat on Gitter, it is clear that the next step to move this along is to send an email to Weblate and request some free hosting. I've drafted up one that we can send to them here:

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Dear Sir/Madam,

On behalf of tldr-pages, I'd like to request free Weblate hosting. tldr-pages is an open-source project dedicated to writing simplified and community-driven manual pages for command-line tools on multiple operating systems.

Our project has over 850 contributors and 24K stars on GitHub. As part of this project, we have recently added support for multiple languages. After doing so we have seen a huge growth in the number of dedicated members of the community contributing translations of tldr pages into 7 languages and counting!

Unfortunately, this has come with the unforeseen difficulty that managing all these translations is becoming quite a challenging task. How can we notify translators when the English page is edited? What about getting other community members to peer-review translations?

It is for this reason that we would like to request free Weblate hosting. By doing so, we hope to not only simplify the translation process for contributors, but also make it easier to manage translations as a whole.

Many Thanks,
Starbeamrainbowlabs (@sbrl)
tldr-pages organisation owner

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Once everyone is in agreement as to the wording, I will send it to them (unless someone else would like to).

/cc @waldyrious, @agnivade, @pxgamer, and @mebeim in particular, though others are welcome to comment.

[mebeim]

Thanks for writing this up. I would say that paragraph 3 is not really needed, it could be omitted, but it overall looks good to me.

Have you looked at the contact form that needs to be used to send this request? It asks for a path to the .po files, so I'm going to add the po4a branch here and push the Italian po file when I can so that they can take a look. You should then specify that the files are on a different branch adding this information where possible in the form (maybe even at the end of the message itself).

[mebeim]

Quoting myself from Gitter here, since it's relevant to the issue:

I think it's quite clear what a component is from this page in the docs: https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/admin/projects.html#component-configuration

So yeah, having huge components is not advisable :\ I think this already kills the idea of asking for free hosting.

[waldyrious]

First of all, I think the wording of the email is perfectly fine. Thanks for preparing it, @sbrl!

I have no objection to removing the paragraph that @mebeim mentioned. It doesn't bother me particularly, but I can agree that we wouldn't lose a lot by not having it either (and the text would be more succinct, which is a plus).

As for the component size issue:

having huge components is not advisable :\ I think this already kills the idea of asking for free hosting.

I haven't had the change to read the Gitter chat backlog yet, but one immediate question that comes to mind reading the above is whether you've been talking about the entire contents of the English pages/ directory being a single translatable component. Is that the case?

Instead, I would expect each page to be a stand-alone translation block (component?), and each example within (description + command line) to be independently translatable, so that volunteers would not have to translate the entire page at once. IIRC we can prevent partially translated pages from being submitted to the repo, but that workflow allows gradual and distributed progress towards that goal, which is quite convenient.

In this case, the issue I can see is having a huge number of components, rather than having a single huge component. Am I missing something? (Feel free to quote the relevant portions of the Gitter chat in response, as I'm sure this has been discussed.)

[mebeim]

@waldyrious TL;DR:

• One single component for all pages → bad, would just make translators' and maintainers' lives harder.
• Multiple smaller components → difficult to manage since it would require grouping pages somehow.
• One component per page → ideal.

Weblate provides 25 components max for a freely hosted project => requesting free hosting on Weblate seems unfeasible.

each example within (description + command line) to be independently translatable

This is true for any configuration of components, what changes is only that the bigger the component, the more conflicts with multiple people working on the same component. At least for what I understood.

Ultimately, the only way to understand how to work this out IMHO is to have someone spin up a self-hosted Weblate instance (even on their personal PC), test for theirself and report back.

[waldyrious]

Weblate provides 25 components max for a freely hosted project => requesting free hosting on Weblate seems unfeasible.

Ah, that explains it. Thanks for the context.

Ultimately, the only way to understand how to work this out IMHO is to have someone spin up a self-hosted Weblate instance (even on their personal PC), test for theirself and report back.

Have options other than Weblate been discussed? I have personally used (as a translator) Translatewiki, Crowdin and Transifex, all of which offer free hosting for open source projects. (Translatewiki is open source itself, by the way.)

[mebeim]

@waldyrious no they haven't been discussed. Unfortunately I currently don't have time to do much.

[waldyrious]

No problem! Just making sure. So it looks like our options are still open, which is nice :)

[sbrl]

Might be worth looking some of those alternatives. Translatewiki looks promising from a quick glance.

[waldyrious]

We can get in touch with them for advice. Hey @Nikerabbit, @siebrand 👋! Do you think TWN would be a good match for the markdown pages we use here? The basic format is this, and at the moment we have one folder per language at the root of the repo, each with the same subfolder structure within (one subfolder per platform/OS).

[Nikerabbit]

FYI, you can ping @translatewiki. We don't have support for loosely defined formats like Markdown or HTML. If you can build conversion tools from and to a supported format, when we can have them translated in translatewiki.net.

[waldyrious]

Thanks for the fast response :) I know pandoc is quite adept at converting markdown into a variety of formats, but I'm not sure we'd want to introduce an extra step into the process, not until we rule out simpler alternatives at least.

Besides Crowdin and Transifex mentioned above, there's also Zanata, mentioned by @mquinson in #2793. Let's see if we can integrate with any of those three.

Update: Re-reading the discussions around this topic, I found a mention of GitLocalize as well, in #2339. It could be a further option to consider.

[comradekingu]

@waldyrious
Crowin and Transifex are closed source projects, and also for most every other reason there is, I would advice against using them. (Transifex being the absolute worst of the two.) Self-hosting Weblate is also possible. I suppose a fundraiser effort to support inclusion of tldr on Hosted Weblate would be good. Would chip in if so. Translatewiki is good, but has lately started using Google Analytics on their site. I think projects on there need to have some kind of relevance to the Wikimedia ecosystem.

[waldyrious]

Self-hosting Weblate is also possible

That's something that we might consider. We already depend on @ostera for the tldr.sh website and on @sbrl for the tldr-bot, and if we add on self-hosting a Weblate instance, it starts becoming reasonable to set up funding (say, with OpenCollective or Liberapay) to cover these services. It's definitely something to discuss. What do you guys think? We have raised the subject before in #3102, so maybe it's time to reconsider it.

Back on topic: I do agree that a FOSS translation platform is preferable, but if we determine that it's too troublesome to set up the system with the available options, I don't think we should outright ban consideration of closed source solutions.

And just a quick note about Translatewiki: AFAIK the projects it hosts only need to be open source, but not necessarily be relevant for Wikimedia.

[Nikerabbit]

And just a quick note about Translatewiki: AFAIK the projects it hosts only need to be open source, but not necessarily be relevant for Wikimedia.

This is correct.

Translatewiki is good, but has lately started using Google Analytics on their site.

Yes we use it for some analytics. You can block it, like I do.

[sbrl]

I'd be up for managing a server that hosts all of our stuff. I manage a few already, so that wouldn't be a particularly hard thing to do.

It might be time to reconsider, yeah. We should discuss that in #3102, where I've already left a comment.

Alternatively, we could build our own custom solution.