These are the requirements that we have defined for our translation web platform before we started working on it.

MUST

  • provide a usable easy web interface
  • be usable from Tor Browser
  • automatic pull from main Git repo
  • provide a common glossary for each language, easy to use and improve
  • allow translators to view, in the correct order, all strings that come from the entire page being translated, both in English and in the target language
  • make it easy to view the translations in context i.e. when translating an entire page, all strings to be translated should only come from this page. translators should be able to view the page in context.
  • provide user roles (admin, reviewer, translator)

SHOULD

  • be "privacy sensitive", i.e. be operated by a nonprofit
  • allow translators to push translations through Git (so that core developers only have to fetch reviewed translations from there)
  • provide support for Git standard development branches (devel, stable, and testing) but we could also agree upon translation only master through this interface
  • provide checks for inconsistent translations
  • provide feature to write/read comments between translators

MAY

  • allow translating topic branches without confusing translators, causing duplicate/premature work, fragmentation or merge conflicts -- e.g. present only new or updated strings in topic branches
  • provide a feature to easily see what is new, what needs updating, what are translation priorities
  • provide possibility to set up new languages easily
  • send email notifications
    • to reviewers whenever new strings have been translated or updated
    • to translators whenever a resource is updated
  • respect authorship (different committers?)
  • provide statistics about the percentage of translated and fuzzy strings
  • Letting translators report about problems in original strings, e.g. with a "Report a problem in the original English text" link, that e.g. results in an email being sent to -l10n@ or -support-private@. If we don't have that, then translate MUST document how to report issues in the original English text.