Description

Currently it is extremely painful to jump in and help translate KDE due to the existing complexity for even those with a technical computer science background. There are 57 subpages alone on the topic. While some of these subpages are things like mailing lists, etc. a good majority of them involve tools, GUI, and stuff like SVN.

Compare the complexity of reading let's say, 30 of those pages, installing and configuring the tools, overhead of dealing with SVN/commits to name just a few compared to something like this Weblate demo where you just create an account, click 'Projects' or 'Languages', click the item of note, and click 'Translate'. The first option which is what KDE has presently is not only intimidating to non-computer science background folk and can scare away potential localizers, but there's the overhead cost of manually dealing with SVN. Using something like Weblate is user friendly; the workflow is arguably more simple and productive which lets you focus on the localization itself.

As a localizer, I've used various web based tools like Pootle, Transifex, Zanata, and Weblate. I believe Weblate philosophically best aligns with KDE given it's libre, and Weblate is the most reliable and allows for self hosting. Weblate also has several useful features like new strings notifications to automatically, easily keep translators up-to-date on new work to be done.

What it will take

• KDE to pay for infrastructure to self host, assuming that's what they want given KDE self hosts Phabricator, etc

• KDE sysadmins to set up web translation tool and interconnect with KDE apps' repositories

How we know we succeeded

Someone can create an account, and translate via web based tool.

Relevant links

Current localization documentation which highlights how complex the existing process is: https://l10n.kde.org/docs/translation-howto/
Weblate demo: https://hosted.weblate.org/
Weblate: https://weblate.org/en/features/

I am willing to put work into this

• add your name

I am interested

• Scott Anecito