Michal Čihař - Translate over web or not?

Translate over web or not?

Recently we opened up translation of phpMyAdmin documentation over web using Pootle tool. As you can see on summary page, it gained some attention, but not much. You are still invited to translate!

However this is not original reason for my post. The reason is that we got question, whether we want to use translatewiki.net for translating phpMyAdmin itself. Currently we use simple PHP files with strings to localize what probably won't change in near future and translatewiki.net seems to already support similar ways of localizing PHP applications.

Now the question is whether to invest effort into this direction. Web based interface definitely lowers barrier for translating, but nobody is really responsible there and you may end up with poor quality. What is better, no translation, or not perfect translation?

PS: I'd really prefer to migrate to gettext based solution for phpMyAdmin, but this seems unlikely, mostly because gettext as integrated in PHP is quite painful. Once you load translation, it is kept opened and any changes in the file lead to segfault and any replacing of the file is deleted. So the only way to make it see updated translation is to restart PHP (or Apache if you use mod_php).