Blender is moving its Manual and UI translation efforts to a more user-friendly web-based interface, Weblate. The goal is to lower the barrier of entry (no knowledge of versioning systems like SVN or Git is necessary), and to make casual minor fixes (like typos and such) trivial for any user, through the suggestions and review process.
Weblate also allows teams to work simultaneously on the same translation, and comes with helpful additional tools, like a glossary.
UPDATE: translate.blender.org is up and running 
How does it work
- Log-in to Weblate with your BlenderID.
- At this point you can already submit suggestions to translations, which need to be reviewed and approved.
- In order to become an official translator/contributor (for both the Manual and the UI), ask to be added to the translators group on Blender Chat or Blender Chat .
- Known issues:
- Submitting a large PO file to weblate (after off-line translation e.g.) takes several minutes to be processed, leaving the page in ‘refresh’ mode all this time. If the processing takes over ten minutes, it will show a timeout error from the server. The operation will be processed though, no need to re-upload the file. After some waiting and reloading the page, the contribution should be finally visible in the web interface.
- Due to the move on this new platform, existing translators and contributors are kindly requested to follow the two steps above (sign up with Blender ID and reach out in the chat) to be added to the project again.
Plan of action
To get the new translation system officially available, we act as follows (starting from tomorrow, Thursday 14th, in the morning European time):
- Design/UX:
- Update website identity to fit with Blender
- Tweak login page to give better feedback about the “wait”
- Remove/tweak alerts about Weblate itself
- Update OG and other meta information to be Blender Specific
- Make UI translation SVN frozen, convert it to git, publish new repo.
- Make Manual translations git frozen.
- Import UI & Manual translation git repos in weblate.
- Update i18n add-on used to generate UI translations from Blender.
- Update documentation (Manual itself, and wiki pages for UI translations).
- See also #65 - Move Blender UI translation repository from SVN to git/gitea - blender-projects-platform - Blender Projects for the UI translations (the manual is basically the same, minus a lot of steps specific to UI translation conversion from SVN to git).
