Today I decided to try some translation tools I could install on my laptop locally to translate Kallithea, so I'd not need to be on-line to use Michal Čihař's wonderful Weblate.
The first tool I tried was Gtranslator. I edited about 5 strings, and then wanted to commit my changes. To my surprise, the diff was huge. Apart from obvious changes in the file header, like changing the team address or X-Generator field, Gtranslator has reformatted almost every other entry in the file, adding meaningless line breaks or reflowing the strings I didn't edit.
@@ -3092,8 +3093,8 @@ msgstr "" #: kallithea/templates/admin/permissions/permissions_globals.html:72 msgid "" -"Write permission to a repository group allows creating repositories " -"inside that group." +"Write permission to a repository group allows creating repositories inside " +"that group." msgstr "" #: kallithea/templates/admin/permissions/permissions_globals.html:77
Apart from that it has quite a dumb user interface, so I most probably won't ever use it again unless things improve.
Well, I thought, I need to try Lokalize which I understand is a Qt4 port of KBabel, which I remember was quite a reasonable translation tool.
Just as with Gtranslator, I created a project, edited one line and hit ‘Save’. As I expected, Lokalize updated the file header, and also changed the formatting of some entries, though the number of changes was significantly lower.
Yet the winner of this competition is Weblate, which indeed avoids unnecessary changes as much as it can, just as advertised. Probably, I'll just stick with it, setting up a local instance.