Creating websites is a lot of work. So if you build one you want to reach as many people with it as possible. One way to do this is to have your website in multiple languages.

You can remake your website again with hardcoded text in multiple languages but, a better approach is to build it once and change the text dynamically. With dynamic texts comes multiple translation files and as with any file, you need to keep it up to date as you go along. 

This isn’t a problem for your native language but what if you need to translate to a language that you don’t know or don’t know well enough? Then you can use a service like Lokalise. It has a ton of features including integration with your version control system so everything is neatly organized. It’s just a shame that it is very pricey:

And it has limitations that make you pay for going over them, making you pay so much more.

Weblate

One day I came across Weblate . As you will see in the image below it is so much cheaper than Lokalise and you would even have active support available for the price. But the nicest thing about it is that you can also host it yourself and even then you can pay for active support on the self hosted instance.

But wait there gotta be a catch right? It can’t possibly be perfect and do everything Lokalise does for so much less? Well I haven’t found anything that weblate can’t do that Lokalise can actually.

What can Weblate do?

Well... what can’t weblate do?

• You can place people in groups and give the groups access to certain projects.

• The projects can be set to being public meaning everyone who can login can see the project or protect them for outside influence:

  

• You can set if those people can only give suggestions or actually edit the file and that it gets committed to your source control.

• You can set if those edits will be made on your main branch or that the changes first need to be approved via a pull request.

• It also works with most common version control system (github/gitlab/bitbucket etc.) but you can also work with purely translation files which can be uploaded in the interface and downloaded again after the changes have been made.

• Progress indication for every language you have in the project:

  

• And it will even mark inconsistencies in the translations. If for example you ended the english translation with a period but not the spanish translation. It will notify you that there is a discrepancy and asks you what to do with it. 

• Automatic Translations

And there are so many more features that I didn’t even discover myself yet.

This will make sure that there is always an option available for you. I currently have DeepL activated and I must say it works very well for the texts I tried it with. The benefit for DeepL is that you can translate 500.000 characters a month for free. And to use weblate with this is as simple as using the api url and a api token that you get from DeepL and things start working.

For example I can tell it for every translation get me the suggestion and insert and save it for me:

One feature that I do want to point out though is the one of automatic translation. This comes in especially handy for translating languages that you are not proficient in or don’t know at them all. In weblate you can use multiple services:

Of course it won’t be perfect as there will be cases where context matters and the translation changes on that. But it will give a good basis from where you can further improve. 

So if I have tickled your interest in weblate give it a go and be amazed at what it can do for free or if you need support or want it hosted (in the cloud) for a fraction of the costs from Lokalise. And if you are hosting it yourself without support, donate so that the team that maintains it can keep going making this amazing piece of software. 

And no I don’t work on Weblate or DeepL or are affiliated with them 😉

https://weblate.org/

https://lokalise.com/