Forward this nice summary of Weblate vs Pootle vs Pontoon by Erin from
Localization Lab that is already public on the archives of
linguine@???:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/arc/linguine/2018-04/msg00007.html
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: [linguine] Pootle, Weblate, Pontoon +
Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2018 11:10:35 +0100
From: Erin McConnell <erinm@???>
Reply-To: Erin McConnell <erinm@???>
Organization: Localization Lab
To: linguine@???
Hello Everyone,
I recently had a chat with folks from TranslateHouse, who formerly
supported
Pootle <
https://pootle.translatehouse.org/> to learn more
about the present and future of Pootle development.
In a nutshell, Mozilla was TranslateHouse's main client and with
Mozilla's full
transition to their own in-house l10n tool, Pontoon, TranslateHouse
stopped full support of Pootle. TranslateHouse has stated they do not plan
on supporting Pootle in the near future and they have released it into
the world to hopefully flourish as a free software project.
TranslateHouse will be focusing more on developing amaGama
<
http://amagama.translatehouse.org/> (a TM management tool which will be
of interest to this group) and other l10n community projects not focused
on tooling.
In TranslateHouse's opinion, there are three main free software l10n
tooling options: Pootle, Weblate and Pontoon. All have pro's and con's.
Weblate:
- Limited development resources, only one full-time developer
- TranslateHouse does not like how it manages version control
integration and thinks that Pootle does it much better.
Pootle:
- Limited development resources. Development on a cloud service that
will ideally support multiple l10n platforms, improvements to git
integration
and UX upgrades are currently self-funded by enthusiasts, however
once they
are no longer self-funded the future of development is unclear.
- Despite limited resources, Pootle is pretty stable after
significant work done on it in the past couple of years.
Pontoon:
- Likely the most stable in terms of assured support because Mozilla has
put all of its l10n engineering resources into the tool and it now
supports all of their projects.
- They may not welcome outside feedback, feature requests etc because
their focus is on Mozilla tools. Most of their feedback is currently
internal and from their own volunteer community.
- They have in-context translation as a selling point, however
TranslateHouse says this feature can be extracted and put on top of any
other tool without significant resources. In-context translation, while
useful in some cases, is also not as efficient as translation in a
traditional editor interface.
I also invited TranslateHouse folks to this list so if there are here
watching (hello!) they can correct or add anything I missed from our
discussion.
On my end, I'm poking the individuals working on Pootle dev. to provide
more updates in this list so that all can be more informed on the
non-Weblate alternatives to Transifex that exist. I would also be very
interested to hear more about their idea of building a multi-platform
cloud service that supports Weblate, Pootle and I think Pontoon.
I'll also look into demos of Pontoon and Pootle.
Best,
--
Erin McConnell
Localization Program Manager | Localization Lab
erinm@???
www.localizationlab.org
t: @l10nlab
8CD3 FA23 F4DF 4463 09F0 6EC1 4AD2 818E 0504 B565
