[python-uk] Transifex experiences - did it save enough time to justify the cost?

[Richard Barran]

I’ve used Transifex on several projects, and so far it’s worked well.

As Pawel says, it doesn’t play well with version control and branching; when you send translation .po files to Transifex, it overwrites *everything* already there, so there is a real potential for losing work. In a similar way to what Pawel does, we only push to Transifex from our staging/beta branch.
Furthermore, we use Fabric and we’ve wrapped into a single command:
- pull down translation files from Transifex.
- compile to .mo files.
- extract new translatable strings from the source code.
- send the .po files to Transifex.
As long as no-one is translating *at that very moment*, we’re safe.

Overall, it’s very much worth the (low) cost, as it provides a nice UI for non-technical translators to work with: .po files are not user-friendly!

Big warning:
Transifex is only for translating the .po files, i.e. the hard-coded text strings in the templates and in the python source.

For translating the *content*, i.e. what’s managed in the admin, you’ll need a different tool.
At the place where I’m working we’ve used dango-hvad on several projects. Quite frankly, it’s a pain, it adds a *lot* to development time, and it’s the source of a large number of weird bugs in our codebase.
However - we have reviewed other apps, and so far our conclusion is (to use a famous quote) “django-hvad is the worst django content translations app, except all those other django content translations apps that have been tried from time to time.”

Hope to help,
Richard

> On 28 May 2015, at 03:57, Paweł Królikowski <rabbbit at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Chris,
> 
> I've worked in a project that used transifex. I wasn't personally involved, but I can share what I overheard over lunch:
> - it worked pretty well, translation management/interface was really cool. We used the transifex provided external translators and it worked pretty cool too. 
> - we had some troubles with translations and branches: AFAIK transifex doesn't support that, so you were only able to push translations from a single branch (otherwise they could get overridden, or disappear) - that slowed down the releases/merging. Other guys were still trying to work around it though, so there might be a solution.
> 
> In short, translations were still a pain, so don't expect miracles. But transifex definitely helped in some parts of the process. And we didn't find a better solution.
> 
> Hope that helps ;),
> 
> Pawel
> 
> On May 27, 2015 22:08, "Richard Nienaber" <rjnienaber at gmail.com <mailto:rjnienaber at gmail.com>> wrote:
> I've come across crowdin.com <http://crowdin.com/> but I haven't had a need to use it yet. 
> 
> Richard
> 
> On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 3:04 AM, Konrad Korżel <konrad at korzel.com <mailto:konrad at korzel.com>> wrote:
> Rosetta <https://github.com/mbi/django-rosetta> is a fine django app that makes translations easier, it uses the admin interface for it.
> 
> On 27 May 2015 at 10:55, Chris Adams <wave at chrisadams.me.uk <mailto:wave at chrisadams.me.uk>> wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm looking after a Django site and I'm looking for a less painful way
> to manage translations of both the content and some parts of the UI that
> users see in the templates.
> 
> Is Transifex the main game in town for doing this these days, if you
> want to manage the workflow without shunting spreadsheets around all
> day? Best to assume noone else in the organisation has heard of Github,
> let alone knows what a pull request is.
> 
> And can anyone on the list share where using it has turned out to be a
> more difficult experience than they were expecting?
> 
> From what I can see on the site it look ideal, almost too good to be
> true...
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Chris
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