With data / config, the translations are recorded in one place and all consumers can get the update without code changes.
The big thing I've been wondering / looking for is a shared, open source translation database. Anyone have links?
This is built-in some of the top software translating platforms to "seed" the initial translation. A bulk kickstart that can optionally later be refined by human translators.
That the UI is not in English does not mean that a non-English person will be able to understand it and use it successfully.
You can only do it if you do not have any kind of support for those international users and if those users are not your real customers but merely statistics in the usage dashboard of a free product.
Obviously, Google Translate is going to produce suboptimal translations, but it does have the big advantage of being easy to automate.
That's a neat idea. It'll be super useful for 80% of the cases, where context is that important. But for the rest of the 20%, context of where the translation will be used, is as important as the word itself. So you cannot always reuse the same translation in different contexts, as it'll sound unnatural then.
Still, if there was a easy solution for being able to change between different options for the translation, having a shared open source translation database for projects to use, would be very valuable and useful.