There’s nothing wrong in using the Machine Translation system built into Weblate as a base to help the process of translating each string.
You need to be aware of some issues introduced by the automatic translation system, in particular Google Translate:
- it may interfere with punctuation, introducing extra spaces before commas or periods, which you’ll need to remove
- it may interfere with markup:
- markup such as
<i>italic</i>
may be tuned into<
and other messes; it’s not dangerous but will look very odd to end-users - placeholders such as
%1$s
,%s
or%d
are replaced with strings generated by the application, and if they are messed up during translation, the application will not only look odd, it may crash (but only in your language, making identification more difficult), please take extra care to make sure no spaces are introduced in these placeholders and that they are not otherwise modified
- markup such as
- when the source string contains line-breaks (indicated by greyed-out ↵ icons), the automatic translation may introduce non-greyed-out such icons in the translated string, which should be replaced with actual line breaks
- another source of minor issues is the introduction of double spaces or spaces before or after the string, which I then need to clean up
I have also added support for Microsoft Translate, which may introduce fewer issues.