Weblate — Hosted Libre

Translation management — free for OSS, picked for future i18n

Weblate — Hosted Libre

Role

The family’s chosen translation-management platform for the day a site or extension picks up a non-English audience. Weblate sits between source files (*.json / *.po / *.ftl in the repo) and human / machine translators, opening pull requests back to the repo when translations are reviewed and approved. Not in active use today — the family is English-only per branding/i18n-weblate-when-ready.md.

Free tier

• Hosted Libre at hosted.weblate.org is free for libre / OSS projects on a public git repo
• Unlimited components, strings, and languages
• Real-time translation memory shared across the public Hosted Libre tenant
• Machine-translation suggestions (DeepL, Google, etc., where Weblate has community keys)
• GitHub / GitLab integration — translations land as PRs
• Glossary, screenshots, comments per string
• Web UI + API for scripted ingest

Card / subscription required?

NO. The Hosted Libre tier is free for libre projects — no card, no quota cliff. Approval is via a short application that confirms the repo is public and OSS-licensed.

Alternatives

• Tolgee — earlier deferral; SaaS free tier exists, self-hosted ruled out by the no-selfhost rule. Kept in the bucket as a documented swap target if Hosted Libre ever rejects the family’s application.
• Lokalise — paid past the free trial
• Crowdin — free for OSS but smaller free tier
• next-intl / react-intl library-only path — no translation management UI, translators commit raw JSON

Swap cost

Low — Weblate stores nothing the repo doesn’t already own. Source files (messages.json, *.po, etc.) live in the consuming repo; Weblate only operates on them. Switching providers means disconnecting Hosted Libre and pointing another tool at the same files.

Why this is our pick

Three reasons:

1. Free for libre forever on a public git repo — fits the no-card-on-file rule and the no-paid-tier rule.
2. Hosted, not self-hosted — Hosted Libre satisfies the . The self-hosted Weblate Docker image is OSS but excluded by policy, same as the Tolgee self-host option.
3. PR-back-to-the-repo workflow matches how every other content change in the family already flows — translations get reviewed in GitHub like any other PR, no separate approval surface.

When to flip on

Per branding/i18n-weblate-when-ready.md: not until a site has measurable non-English traffic or a real multilingual audience request. Tooling without a use case is deferred indefinitely.

Cross-refs

• branding/i18n-weblate-when-ready.md — the locking decision
• services/business/i18n/tolgee.md — earlier deferred i18n option
• No card-on-file rule

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