🌏 How should we approach translations?

[JFWooten4]

There are a lot of legacy imports in i18n which use CROWDIN translations. The documentation on this was last updated in #1147 a little over a year ago. Comparatively, Kaan introduced the cool Google on-the-fly translations last month.

I understand that some of the Spanish CROWDIN pages were manually proofread, although I can't tell by whom based on the git history. Obviously we don't have this with the script — but we do get real-time updates. In #2145, I saw just how out-of-date some of these i18n pages got, often falling two or three commits behind in content substance.

However, I also found myself adding Spanish-only pages based on international content, which you can't really do with the Translate drop-in. Thus, we find ourselves with two options for internationalization which affect site build structure. Which methods do people prefer, or has there been any other discussion on this?

[ElliotFriend]

good questions here!

the /i18n directory, doesn't every really need to be modified or "touched" manually. the way crowdin worked was to "auto-translate" everything on their platform, and then sync that into the repository's /i18n directory (first this was done at build-time, and later we moved to having a cronjob do that while maintaining a copy of the files committed in the repo itself).

that said, the /i18n directory is actually unused at this time. since we moved to having the google translate setup (thanks, as you mentioned, to @kaankacar!), all of that is done in the client. so, the auto-translated files, crowdin config, etc. never really gets touched. the biggest benefits are no build-time unpredictability/crashes (which used to happen a lot with the crowdin integration), and more language selections. the price we pay for those benefits are less control over what does or doesn't get translated (crowdin allows for a "glossary" of things that should never be translated), and sometimes the styles can be a little wonky.

my own preference, at this point in time, is the google translate method. it has alleviated a lot of build/maintenance headaches for us.

[JFWooten4]

Yeah, the build problems are the main reason I brought it up

[JFWooten4]

I ran into a problem in #2398 where introducing new pages (and hence cross-references) can diverge between the English and Spanish versions. Obviously, since it's unused, I can't remember the last time CROWDIN actually ran to regenerate old pages, much less add text for new ones. So you run into a situation where new links only apply to docs outside i18n, which is a sad difference avoided with the Translate implementation.

[ElliotFriend]

we've landed on a google translate strategy for this, and the merge of #2410 codifies it. the (bothersome lol) i18n/ directory is now gone, and so is the configs, functions, etc. thanks @JFWooten4!!