More Weblate details

written by Chris Oelmueller on 2013-05-17

Heya!

As promised, a more detailed blog about what's new with our recent Weblate migration, what changed and what didn't. First of all I'd like to address a question raised on IRC: Your user data was compatible because both Pootle and Weblate base their authentication on Django. No plain-text credentials stored anywhere. The hashed+salted passwords in question were encrypted and only shared with me, nihathrael (old Pootle server admin) and Michal (new Weblate server admin).

Weblate has a strong link to our git repository, and as such prepares commits for each "session" you take in translating anything. It collects those commits and pushes them to our main repository automatically whenever either new commits are pushed by developers or a translation reaches 100% for any language and subproject. This ensures that we always get up-to-date translations. Because everything is automated, there is no longer a need for our old language admins to manually trigger commits and pushes.

As with our old Pootle server, you do not need to register an account to contribute. If you don't, you will only be able to suggest translations however. Registered accounts (including those migrated from old Pootle) can "save" translations (old "submit" in Pootle) and also review suggestions. In case you want to discuss something with other translation team members before committing: "suggest" also works as registered user.

Some of the new features we want to highlight:

The interface in Weblate changes depending on what you're doing currently, so there are different tabs around the bottom of the page if you currently work translating a string (glossary, similar translations, nearby strings, machine translation suggestions, ...), navigate a language in a subproject, navigate a subproject, and so on. There are lots of useful gems hidden and features available to ease translation - make sure to check them out!

As promised we set up a new subdomain for our new translation server: translate.unknown-horizons.org. We also updated some old documentation on our website, wiki and repository which now link to Weblate instead of pootle. Everything trying to reach our old Pootle server is currently redirected to this page: Engage

Some issues still remain open for the moment:

That's it for now, ask a question on IRC or mail us if you'd like more information about anything Weblate!

Have fun translating,
The Unknown Horizons Team