Hi everyone,
Quick version: we’re pausing new requests to add projects to the Nextcloud Transifex org for now. This has no effect on the App Store, and nothing that’s already translated is going anywhere.
If you open a request to add an app or project to Transifex right now, we’ll put it on hold and will get back to you once things are sorted out.
Everything else keeps running as normal. Apps still get accepted, reviewed and published the same way - translation was never a requirement for that, and it still isn’t. Apps already on Transifex are still translated and will keep syncing. Also, you can always add your own translations in your own repo; the translation pause only touches the shared org.
As for the why: The Nextcloud project on Transifex has grown to around 300 resources by now: server, mobile clients, recommended apps, third-party apps, and many more. The project on Transifex is at a size where translators genuinely can’t find their way around anymore, and adding one more project costs a lot more than it looks like from the outside.
A handful of volunteers do the onboarding, keep the priority list current, write the announcements. Adding a project without giving them more resources simply makes the pile bigger. Additionally, strings show up all the time with zero context, and a translator can’t tell what they mean without going and reading the code. So the same string ends up getting translated two or three times, which is exactly the kind of effort small language teams don’t have lying around.
We’d rather stop accepting translation requests for new apps for a bit and actually fix this than keep adding projects nobody has the bandwidth to translate. A few language teams have already given up entirely; that’s the thing we’re trying to head off before it happens again.
We’re working on what needs to be in place first: automated checks so obvious problems in source strings get caught before a translator ever lays eyes on them, a review step before anything new goes live, and a structure that doesn’t leave people lost. We’ll post again once requests reopen.
In the meantime, there’s a few things everyone can do that will help.
Write context for your strings - a short translator comment on anything ambiguous is probably the single most useful thing a developer can do here. Something like “Create” or “Open” can be a verb or a noun and the translator only ever sees the bare string, never your code.
Use positional placeholders (%1$s, %2$s) instead of a bare %s any time there’s more than one, so the word order can shift between languages.
And go ahead and open your request anyway - it gets queued, not deleted, and it’s genuinely useful for us to see what the real demand looks like.
Thanks for bearing with us. And a real thank you to the translators who’ve been holding this together.