Traduora is now open source | Hacker News Reader

Traduora is now open source

traduora.com

131 pointsamzans23 comments

Great to see that it is actual FOSS (Affero GPLv3), and not some weird home-brewed 'open' license!

Thank you for the feedback. After a lot of thought I finally settled on AGPLv3 because it makes it easy for the users to use and benefit from any improvements developed by others.

I feel that it's the right way to do it. But I guess that only time will tell.

Very good choice.

Congrats for shipping this free software project!

I'll probably need such a tool in the future. This will be an option if by that time it supports gettext files (.po) as that's what I settled on ;-) (I'm surprised po files are not supported actually. I'm no expert of the field and might be very wrong, but I thought gettext was close to be the standard)

> The roadmap includes: Apple Strings, PHP arrays, Microsoft Resources, Gettext (po), Android Resources (xml).

I've just added basic support for importing and exporting gettext files. If you end up trying it out let me know how did it go :)

How does it compare to something like Pootle (https://github.com/translate/pootle)?

I think Pootle is a great project with a (much) longer history than traduora and it's very rich in terms of editing features.

While traduora will have a lot of commonly used editing features, I'd like the focus to be on enabling small and medium teams to easily translate their projects without much overhead. That's where upcoming features like automatic translations come in handy as they provide a good "starting point" for a lot of cases or also for example the ability to deliver translations over the air to your apps/websites.

I'm convinced that in open sourcing traduora, it’s an effective way to make the best product possible, while growing a community and giving developers confidence to build on top of it as a platform.

Cool, awesome to see more opensource in this space. A long time ago (2009), I was launching the world digital library (wdl.org) had to deal with lots of content translations. I tried using Pootle (which also supports saas api translation as a starting point), but we ended up just using Transifex with consultants, because machine translations weren't good enough at the time. The world has changed :-)

I used to (professionally) work on Pootle years ago. The critical difference: Pootle does not offer any hosted solution; we never gathered the devops skills to offer that at the time.

Today would be different but it's also a project with a massive amount of technical debt, I'm doubtful about its future.

Pootle does however offer a crapton of features and formats. Traduora lacks something as basic as pofile support.

All the best to the team, I'm very glad to see another open source alternative, especially one with SaaS backing it. The only other one is Localize (https://localizejs.com/), which is kinda awful and not actually fully open (not self-hostable).

Bit of a shame the git history is lost in the open sourcing though…

Edit: Oh… the SaaS portion is not open yet. Well, that's a massive opportunity lost.

PS: You should add postgres support!

Does Traduroa use a workflow engine/library? Or did you develop your own?

That is awesome, I was trying to find something like this for an open source project I manage: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash Kudos to the author!

So this is like a platform where your translators work together and you keep track of all your translations?

If this is correct it seems like a super niche product. Very few companies directly employ translators or need a solution for keeping track of translations.

While traduora is also aimed at the use case you describe, the focus is on enabling small and medium teams to easily translate their projects without much overhead.

For example via automatic translations of your project or delivering translation updates over the air.

So it's also an alternative to multilingual CMSs (but only for text)?

There are lots of applications (including web applications) where translations for multiple human languages are needed. Seems useful.

Absolutely not true that this is niche. Almost all international online saas or stores have embedded translation and copy teams.

The ones I've seen first hand use services like One Hour Translation and then use whatever e-commerce solution to manage the translations (Magento, Shopify, Wordpress, etc).

It's probable big ones like Amazon do have their own translation teams, but generally speaking most companies (in any industry) rarely hire a translator directly and work with agencies.

My wife is a translator and works for a number of agencies. I see the projects she works on, and that even includes some very large companies like Facebook or Netflix.

We have only 2 languages to support, and most people in company (but not everyone) are native speakers of both languages. So, no professional translators are involved, but someone have to write texts. And those who have good text-writing skills will have discomfort with editing nested yaml files on git.

Poedit does not support nested yaml files, and this application supports them, and it will be useful even if it's used by single person.

Yeah, but this is quite a unique situation. Not only you are probably in a bilingual country like say Canada, but you also don't require difficult or quality translations. For example legal texts, or marketing texts.

You don’t need to employ professional translators to do in-house translations.

Depends on many factors.

So for example you have these Chinese restaurants menus with terrible translations and nobody cares if the translation is good.

What about legal texts or maybe medical brochures?

Yes, it depends. "You don’t need to employ professional translators to do in-house translations" doesn’t mean "You must not employ professional translators to do in-house translations".

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