Markdown translation feedback

[fnetX]

Hi! I heard that you are looking for feedback with Markdown translations, so here it is.

The goal is to translate a list of news as markdown files for the A.E.S. Minigame server. They loosely look like this:

• somenews_en.md
• somenews_de.md
• somenews_it.md
• announcementx_en.md
• announcementx_it.md
• announcementx_fr.md
• etc

The good thing: Representing the markdown files line by line seems fine for our use case.

However, the big challenge is the dynamic list of files. We enabled automatic component discovery. It took me a long time to figure out how the setup is supposed to work. The documentation lists examples and I probably quickly adapted one for my needs. However, I was completely lost about how to fill the other fields. It took me about 15 minutes of trial-n-error to made the error message "Please include component mark-up in the template" go away. Please, since you apparently already know exactly what I do wrong, tell me how to fix it. For example by linking to the docs or just directly telling me that I should put {{component}} somewhere. In the end, I found https://github.com/orgs/WeblateOrg/discussions/13457 that uses some kind of placeholders, and after this syntax was also not accepted, I copied the component placeholder from the name field which worked. Only after the successful setup, I discovered the correct mention in the docs, which I rather interpreted as "this is optional, you can use this if you like", not as "This is the most important thing to understand about this feature".

The second challenge is the available languages. Someone who is just clicking on a language and seeing which translations are missing will never translate any of our news, because the language does not exist yet. People need to visit the components one by one in order to see which ones still lack their language, and then add the translation. This is cumbesome and really annoying.

I opened the component, visited the add-ons menu and tried installing the "Add missing languages" addon. I was confused about how it actually works, and even more surprised to find that it seems to be added to all components. I found this mention in the docs: "Unlike most others, this add-on affects the whole project". Please make this obvious so I don't risk ruining my project by inadvertently trying this component.

All in all, the workflow does not really work for us, because it is very unlikely that anyone will ever create a missing language for it.

For our use case, it would be much more convenient if it was possible to make the setup much simpler (without requiring to add and configure a ton of add-ons) and just have one component with all strings from the files.

[fnetX]

By the way, I just realized that the inadvertent enabling of "Add missing languages" addon really messed up all our translations across all repos without any confirmation by adding a lot of pointless huge untranslated language files 😞 . Would also appreciate pointers to undo this if possible ...

[fnetX]

Adding to my confusion: Next to the auto-created languages not showing in the UI, Weblate also hasn't updated the internal VCS information.

Weblate shows the latest "healthy" commit, but the Git repo itself has a newer commit which added all the languages.

[nijel]

Something had to go wrong in the languages creation; that's why they are not visible in the UI and the commit info is outdated. Was there some error in the server logs?

[fnetX]

I didn't check the server logs back then, and I assume they rotated already. I remember that I removed the add-on really quickly, because it didn't do what I wanted. Maybe this interrupted something?

However, being inconsistent about what is shown is not new to me. It's a recurring problem. For example, I just reset a repo and pulling from it confirms that it is correct. But it still shows an outdated commit.

I extracted some log output (grepping for the name) and attached it here:
weblate.log

[fnetX]

I'm having more weird behaviour. In some repos, I wanted to reset Weblate's state to get rid of the stale commits and sync with upstream's state. However, the reset doesn't seem to work properly. Log attached again.

It looks like this both before and after the "reset changes and discard":

weblate.log

[nijel]

Indeed, reset doesn't properly update this bit; #19039 fixes this.

[nijel]

Thanks for the feedback; we can definitely improve based on that!

The first things I've picked up are improvements to the add-ons:

• feat(add-ons): show preview for language consistency add-on #19024
• feat(add-ons): improve discovery configuration and documentation #19023

[fnetX]

Thank you so much!

[nijel]

#19040 will make the discovery add-on setup a one-click action for many use cases.

[fnetX]

Thank you. Feel free to close this discussion once you no longer see actionable items. If I have new feedback, I can also create a new one.

[nijel]

I might have easily missed something because this mixed a lot of feeback 😃

[fnetX]

I think most if not all was addressed. I think the next step would be for us to test the changes and then report back :)