Overview of localization tools.
I have collected a large number of proposals from Artyom, Roman, Nuno, Goncalo, selected 8 of them in my opinion the most successful platforms and checked how well they fit us.
I checked which of service fit us on the basis of features reviews from Goncalo, Nuno, and Roman, and tested following features:
- Format support - localization formats which we can upload / download to / from service
- Quality checks - checks on the correctness of the translation
- Prulals - supports multiple forms and checks their spelling
- Glossary - helps to standardize the way terms in your project are translated
- Translation history - ...
- Translation memory - system to provide automatic suggestions based on similarities between source strings
- VCS - can we use a repository on github / bitbucket
- Automatically download / upload strings - can we automatically update our strings
- Opensource - the service is open and we can install it locally
- Comment for translation - ...
- Suggestion voting - translators offer translation and reviewer selects the most appropriate option
- API - ...
- User notification - notify the service user of the changes in the project
- The hierarchy of users (Administrator, manager, translator) - the hierarchy of users for more safe translations
- Group people by team - group of people on the team
- Work on command line (console) - the ability to work through the console and automate some action
I also checked the reviews about each platform, in order to understand what other user may miss.
As a result, I created a table which shows how different features are supported in different services. I also gave an overview of the most appropriate services.
An important question is which service model to use. Wheter we should use an Open Source code locally instalable products, or we should stick to paid third-party services?
Pros local services:
- Extensibility (eg do authentication with todoist)
- Free
- Safety (we don't have to keep our translations somewhere else)
Minuses:
- It is up to us to set up and configure them
- Sometimes they don't have any commercial support and their development is slow