All of my work on multilingual CiviCRM features, while required by many worldwide, cross-border and/or multi-cultural organisations, would be in vain if it weren’t for the hard and very under-appreciated work of numerous translators, contributing many man-hours to over thirty CiviCRM translations hosted on our translations server – hence one of my Google Summer of Code sub-projects was to ease the translators’ work as much as possible.

As we host the translations in a separate repository on our Subversion server, the best way to ease the translators’ work (and to let them see the effects of their translations in the ‘natural environment’ of a CiviCRM install) is to allow them to commit their work to the repository at their leisure and then update a dedicated CiviCRM install to reflect the translation changes outright.

The first part of the above is now implemented, and translators, once done with a certain chunk of work, are free to commit it themselves to our repository. The second part, which will be a simple post-commit hook refreshing a dedicated CiviCRM install, will be implemented after we branch for CiviCRM 2.3 development (which should happen sometime early July), as we want to have this nice bonus as an incentive for working on the translations for the most recent version of CiviCRM (note that we’ll be automatically backporting 2.3’s translations to earlier versions, thanks to the previous work during this GSoC project). After we brach for CiviCRM 2.3, I’ll setup an installation dedicated for translators’ needs and make it auto-update with new translations on every commit.