Abstract
Nowadays, applications are developed for a variety of platforms, and even though developers
strive to cover as much of the potential market as possible, there are still a lot of problems
when it comes to the localization of the applications. Usually, a developer will support only
the majoritarian language in a country and will ignore other languages due to time and budget
constraints. It does not matter if it is a website or a mobile application, the amount of effort
that goes into the translation of them is equal. User requests on adding a particular language
are usually given low priority due to the small size of the user base that would use that
language as well as problems with the actual translation.
At the same moment we live in a time were crowdsourcing niche projects has become the
norm and user contributions are highly valued for these low-demand features. Crowdsourcing
is usually done for free, on a voluntary basis. Be it astronomy, ornithology or linguistics,
crowd’s contributions can be vital in different fields.
When it comes to software translation, although there are many services on the field that
provide the developers a platform where users can contribute to the translation of the
application, most of them are closed sourced, paid or have strict limitations.
This goal of this project is to kickstart and maintain an open source crowd-sourced translation
platform. Going open source will not only allow any developer to use the service either as a
hosted solution or self-host it themselves, but it will also provide a natural means of attracting
new developers that might be interested in further developing the platform. The developers
will share their resource files and with the help of their users and other enthusiasts the
application will be translated to minority languages. The project’s modular architecture
allows extending the application without having to change any internals.
