(sorry not to have written this before, I've been very busy these weeks)
In the past Plone Conference I organized an Internationalization Team Open Space but only 3 people attended that meeting.
In the meeting I raised the topic about how to handle Plone translation files. We have to be careful with this, because the translations for Plone 6 live in plone.app.locales and also in Volto itself.
There have been in the past some efforts to use a translation platform like Transifex to handle Plone translations but it was not successful at all and currently the Transifex link is unmaintained. Sometimes there has been a suggestion in this and other forums about using a translation platform as a way to better handle the translation process (automatic use of translation memories, easy to use for non developers because one doesn't need to use git just login in a platform, ...).
I myself have used Transifex, Crowdin and Weblate to translate several different software, and I find all of them OK. I think that Weblate aligns better with the free software spirit, because not only provides free to use services for free software, it is also free software. The others offer (at least the last time I looked at them) free services for free software.
So I re-raise the topic here: is there interest in the community to transition Plone's translation files to a web-based localization platform? If so, is there someone willing to help on it?
The poll wants to know the opinion of the community. The selection of the platform (if the idea goes forward) will come at a later stage and will need more findings.
No, Plone's translation are OK right now edited in PO files in git
Yes, I think it's OK to move to a web-based platform, but I have no time to help on it
Yes, I think it's OK to move to a web-based platform, and I want to volunteer to this task
"transition"... how is the process of syncing back/forward between the third-party service and our source of truth, the po files? I remember contributing translations to other projects that used transifex and being always very confused on how to proceed. I've always ended up with badly out of sync files (mainly because I was doing translations in poedit, while they were probably maintained on transifex).
In my mind the ideal system would include a plone.org subsection where translations can be created, using that section automatically creates a PR in github for those po files.
Our Plone policy package includes over 7,000 industry-specific terms that are being translated to 17 languages. We host a Pootle server, where a handful of people (mostly internal to the organization) contribute their translation. Invariably, they find it easy to use and I was able to use a fire-and-forget approach after initial installation and configuration... The translations are updated nightly via a cron script (unfortunately a Plone restart is required).
However, from their FAQ
Does Pootle run under Python 3?
Pootle does not, yet, support Python 3 but it definitely is a goal.
Our first priority has been cleaning up the code and getting onto the latest version of Django. We’ve achieved that with Pootle 2.8.0.
We also want to be Django warning free, we’ve also achieved that in Pootle 2.8.0.
All of these where needed to ease to migration to Python 3.
Currently, we’re trying to eliminate Python 2 specific changes and we’re coding pylint checks to prevent any regression.
If you want to help make this happen sooner, patches are welcome.