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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:

GitHub graph showing the contributions to the Traducir project

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:

  1. Fork the current Traducir repository into Stack Overflow's private GitHub organization
  2. 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)
  3. 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).

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    My only comment is goodbye and thanks for all the fish, and my only wish is that you'll keep enjoying what you do, wherever you go. Good luck! :) wiping away a tear Apr 17 at 14:54
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    "This does mean that the community won't be able to submit PRs to fix issues themselves." Is this a technical limitation by the SE infrastructure? If this can be worked around, I know of another major project that has outgrown running on private hardware.
    – Mast
    Apr 17 at 14:55
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    This is not a technical limitation, but a focus limitation. If this was kept open source, the expectation is that the maintainer keeps tabs on issues, PRs and other community-generated issues. Since the team doesn't have the bandwidth to do that, keeping it closed source doesn't set the wrong expectations. If this was a project that's alive, I'd have thought it's a bad thing, but fortunately that's not the case with Traducir (and I say fortunately because if it were, I'd have had to abandon it earlier)
    – g3rv4
    Apr 17 at 14:59
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    I hope running great but essential bits on your own infrastructure isn't a habit of SE devs. Who knows what still runs under Nick his desk. Thanks for hosting the supporting bits for the international SO sites. All the best with your next endeavor and I'm sure we'll have you back again in the future. Cheers!
    – rene
    Apr 17 at 15:00
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    @rene the whole of the SE codebase runs in Nick's personal PC, duh. :P Apr 17 at 15:01
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    this is an unorthodox project... I started it on my personal time, I could have done it as a regular user honestly
    – g3rv4
    Apr 17 at 15:02
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    Thanks for the update and good luck!
    – aepot
    Apr 18 at 20:12

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Database backups are gone. Will there be any replacement? Backups were useful to investigate translation history, because the Traducir UI didn't provide it. Or maybe Data Explorer could be made to support Traducir databases?

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    We wanted to move the bare minimum functionality to our infrastucture in order to keep Traducir functional. We had a very tight schedule and working on providing backups would’ve prevented us to meet the deadline. However, providing the backups are in our backlog and I hope we’ll bring them back in May.
    – onatm StaffMod
    Apr 21 at 15:27
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    I know we were hoping to bring them back in May but lots of thing got in our way. Anyways, you can now download the backups as you used to do! es.traducir.win/backups
    – onatm StaffMod
    Aug 10 at 9:56

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