As part of the move to the Extensions platform for Blender 4.2LTS, and the deprecation of the ‘good old add-ons’, the UI Translate has been move to the ‘core’ feature. In other words, it is now part of the main Blender codebase.
‘Translate From the UI’ Issues
This feature from the add-on (available from the right-click contextual menu on RNA properties UI widget) has always had several issues:
- Cumbersome to set up.
- Never effectively tested/maintained in any OS but Linux.
- Only allows to translate a (significant) subset of whole set of translatable messages.
- Implementation wise, a somewhat weird mix of C++ code in Blender itself, and python code from the add-on.
In addition, the move to Weblate as main translation platform last year made it even less relevant and easy to use, since translator would now have to download the PO file from weblate, use the add-on to edit it, and upload it back on weblate.
Removal
All of these issues mean that the ‘translate from the UI’ feature would require some significant updates to match quality expectations for a ‘core’ Blender feature, both in term of usability and implementation.
Since there is no time available currently among the dev team to tackle such project, the proposal is to remove it for the time being. This implies removing some wrapper C++ code (operators), and the edit_translation.py file from the add-on code.
Bringing back the feature would likely include usage of the weblate API, a runtime-cache of the new translations in Blender to immediately see the edits, etc.