I am new here, and I am considering participating in translating Privacy Guides. However, I found that Crowdin is used for translations, and Git merge requests to i18n are rejected. I’m not comfortable with using Crowdin, therefore I don’t think I will contribute as a translator while Crowdin is used.
Crowdin is a proprietary, software as a service (SaaS) translation service, in some ways similar to Transifex. Crowdin collects vast personal information from everyone who interacts with its website, heavily tracks visitors including project contributors (with cookies, analytics and other means), and shares information with many third parties. Furthermore, Crowdin’s website frequently blocks Tor users. I believe these would most likely in opposition to what Privacy Guides believes in.
Assuming Crowdin account holders generally can contribute translations to Privacy Guides, I’d also guess that Privacy Guides receives translations from people who have no knowledge of Privacy Guides or privacy.
If Crowdin decides to close down or remove Privacy Guides’s project/access, Privacy Guides may lose translation work (although copied to GitHub) or the tooling required to work on translations.
I suggest migrating from Crowdin to Weblate. Weblate is FOSS (free and open source), and it is both self-hostable and hosts projects at hosted.weblate.org.
Maybe Privacy Guides can get a project at hosted.weblate.org as a first step, and then set up self-hosting when there is enough time and resources to do so?
I don’t know about the workflows of Privacy Guides’ translations, Crowdin and Weblate. I also don’t know Privacy Guides’ reasons for choosing Crowdin. Also, I understand that a migration would require significant effort, so I can only make a suggestion. However, I hope it will be given consideration.