It's been a long time since we started using Traducir on Stack Overflow en español in 2018. We originally built it as open source, which not only let us accept contributions from users, but more importantly let us discuss the problems we were facing and implementation ideas.
The most impressive thing about Traducir is that we, the international communities, were able to solve a problem we faced using a tool built by the international communities ourselves.
In terms of the effort that it took us, we basically spent a lot of time in 2018 to make Traducir work – but since then, the only significant maintenance work I’ve needed to do was to rewrite the frontend to not use React (it turned out to be a lot of work to maintain). Other than that, it's been working just fine – even as we started using it on the other international sites (right now, it's what all our international communities use to submit translations).
Look at this graph – it makes me proud that we have built something that just works and that requires so little maintenance:
Since the inception of Traducir, it's been running on my personal infrastructure. Originally, this wasn't much of a concern, as the translations were manually reviewed by Community Managers before they went live on sites – but since that process became automated, I've been a bit concerned about hosting it myself (as my focus is software development, not being a Site Reliability Engineer).
When I left Stack Overflow the first time, I transferred ownership of the traducir.win domain to Stack Overflow, but I continued running it on my own infrastructure. Now that I'm leaving Stack Overflow again (at the end of this month), I'd love to take this responsibility off my shoulders as well.
This is why we're planning to move Traducir to Stack Overflow’s infrastructure, where the company will secure it, keep it running, and maintain it.
As part of this move, we're planning to:
- Fork the current Traducir repository into Stack Overflow's private GitHub organization
- Archive the current repository (so that the code can still be publicly referenced, but it's clear that the public repo is not maintained anymore)
- Move the application itself to Stack Overflow’s infrastructure
This does mean that the community won't be able to submit PRs to fix issues themselves. However, when we went through the code contribution history, we found that the last significant non-employee contribution was in 2019 (and even that was from a former employee). This won’t have any impact on how the community uses Traducir to submit translations (aside from a few minutes of downtime), but we wanted to make you all aware of what’s happening.
So that's the news! I'm relieved to be handing Traducir over to Stack Overflow. :) If you have comments or questions, leave them here. And if you encounter any issues with Traducir (or want to suggest improvements), you can always post them on Meta (and the site moderators can escalate them for staff attention if necessary).
