I'm happy to announce that a new service launched beta testing on Drupal.org under http://localize.drupal.org/ to help translation teams involve more people and reach new heights in the level of Drupal.org project translations. This central web based translation service is about to step in place of generating translation templates manually, committing them to CVS and releasing them with projects waiting for teams to picking them up and then committing translations on their behalf from the perspective of the module and theme maintainers.

This centralized service already helps module and theme developers by automatically parsing all release source codes posted on Drupal.org slightly after they are published, and helps translation teams by easing sharing work among contributed modules. While we have almost 5000 projects with releases, the total number of translatable strings is "only" above 147000, "just" 40 times the strings found in Drupal core. There is lots of repetition and similar content of which this central service provides oversight for translators. Drupal site owners using the Localization client tool can contribute to translations on Drupal.org directly from the convenience of their website.

Localize.drupal.org is also set to help users with an install profile which will integrate with this service and download and update translations when requested from packages hosted on the server. This side of the service is still in its specification phases, so do not expect immediate results.

However, ten of the localization teams already migrated to localize.drupal.org, so the early adopters include Croatian; Czech; Dutch; Hindi; Japanese; Lithuanian; Norwegian Bokmål; Norwegian Nynorsk; Telugu and Portuguese, Portugal. It is very easy to join these translation teams, since your Drupal.org user account works in a single-sign-on system with localize.drupal.org, so you don't need to register a new user account at all.

Those interested in more details of the service are welcome at the Drupalcon Paris session titled "Here comes localize.drupal.org" on September 2nd. Those interested in contributing to the infrastructure under this service, your help is most useful in the Localization server issue queue, where you can help write tests for the module (which ensures easier feature deployment and performance changes in the future) as well as fixing any outstanding performance concerns.