Hey folks, I am a developer of a small gui tool. Writing it was a pretty chill experience except for one super annoying thing (well actually two, flatpak’s sandbox was a nightmare…) and that was translations.
me crying about stuff:
I looked online for people who might want to do some translations, and after hours I got one person who argued with me over some licensing stuff (that I didn’t really understand) and then disappeared. Then, someone told me to try online translation services, which I did. I tried something from mozilla (can’t remember the url) but it took ages to load a language-model or something. Then I tried a combination of google translator and deepl, which worked more or less but wasn’t pleasant. I was doing copy and paste for every one of the 50 strings or so and that for every language. And then I had to learn foreign grammar to fix stuff because every translator/spellchecker was giving me different results. I did four languages in the end before I got tired of it. I left instructions on my repo for how to submit translations and put links everywhere, but nothing happened yet. So I was wondering: how do other people do this stuff? Is there a better way to do this? I don’t feel like continuing this unless there’s a good way to automate the process.
To give you an idea of what I’d think is better, I’ll make a description of what I would like the best, then you can tell me if something like that (or similar to that) exists:
A website/graphical tool/commandline tool where I can throw a .po file in and get a bunch of .po files back. Should work with stock names (used those back in the days of gtk2 and loved it), like giving it “BUTTON_CANCEL” or something and then having that replaced with the translations for all kinds of languages. Don’t want no crappy AI generated results. I want to have a list of strings that were reviewed by human beings and are definitely accurate translations. Also, no legal stuff, no need to give anyone credit for anything, just the files.