Practical Workflow Governance for Git Traditional Chinese Localization

Git is a tool that almost every developer touches every day, but you may not have thought much about how its Traditional Chinese translation is maintained.

This talk is not about linguistic debates over “what is the perfect translation for this one term.” In reality, the Git Traditional Chinese localization community is small, and the hardest problems are usually not about translation decisions. They are much more practical: how do we get people to start contributing? How do we review translations? And how do we turn everyone’s contributions into submissions that follow Git’s upstream localization conventions?

Git l10n has its own way of working. Translating Git is not as simple as having someone edit a .po file and open a PR. You need to know which repository to submit to, what commit format is expected, how Signed-off-by should be handled, when and how to squash commits, how changes are sent through the l10n process, and eventually how they make it into a Git release. These rules are not always intuitive even for people who already use Git, let alone new contributors who just want to fix a single Chinese string.

To lower the barrier to entry, we introduced Weblate so that people who are not familiar with the Git contribution workflow could still help translate directly in a web interface. But after adopting it, we found that the way Weblate generates commits does not fully align with git-l10n’s expectations for commit history. As a result, maintainers had to design a practical middle layer between “making contribution easy” and “making the result acceptable upstream.”

In this talk, I will share the real-world pitfalls the Git Traditional Chinese localization team has run into: how the translation was initially bootstrapped from the Simplified Chinese version, how we try to attract new contributors, how we review translation quality, how we deal with commits generated by Weblate, how we preserve contributor credit through manual squashing, Co-authored-by, and automation scripts, and how we eventually send the cleaned-up result into Git’s official l10n process.

The talk will also walk through the full journey of a translated string: from being edited in Weblate, reviewed by maintainers, reorganized into a commit that follows upstream conventions, and finally shipped in a Git release. Along the way, I will discuss what is worth automating when the team has limited capacity, what still requires human judgment, and how maintainers balance contributor experience with upstream requirements.

If you maintain an open source project, want to build a translation workflow, are thinking about how to lower the barrier for contributors, or are simply curious about how one Chinese sentence officially makes its way into Git, this talk offers a small but complete real-world case study.