Online Translation Tools

There are a number of online translation tools that you might want to use to assist your translation projects. Being online they allow you to work from anywhere, it also allows many people to participate without having to install software or configure a PO editing tool.

As the developers of Pootle we are happy to see that the idea of online translation has become more popular since we originally gave Pootle to the world.

Web-based Tools

These are some tools of which only some are still available. The others are kept for historical reference.

An important issue for these is the extent to which they allow offline translation, access control and quality assurance.

  • Pootle – A multi-format system for translation and translation project management with many features. Actively being developed and used by Translate.org.za along with the Translate Toolkit and Virtaal. There is also an active translation portal for those who cannot host there own copy of Pootle. Pootle is released under the GPL.
  • Kartouche – Developed for the Welsh localisation team. See also Omnivore their online compendium tool. See the Welsh team’s live site.
  • IRMA – Developed by Linspire aiming to make things as simple as possible for translators. Michael Robertson of Linspire talks about his first date with IRMA. This is not free software.
  • Rosetta – Developed by Canonical for the translation of Ubuntu. Aims to make it easy to translate software, but is hard to install. Used to be proprietary, but now under AGPL and other licenses.
  • WeBabel – A PHP & MySQL translation portal. Released under the GPL
  • An OpenOffice.org specific tool – Used by the Danish team and developed by Søren Thing Pedersen
  • Entrans – A web based translation system originally for Indian translation. GPL.
  • Transifex – A web based front end for version control systems with an editing interface. GPL, but demands the signing of a Contributor License Agreement to contribute
  • Weblate - A free software web-based translation tool with tight version control integration. It features a simple and clean user interface, propagation of translations across components, quality checks and automatic linking to source files.