Translation communities are usually formed independently for each project. One limitation of this approach is that each project is required to create its own translation community and manage its accounts and contributions. Another is that each translator is required to create different accounts and probably learn a new version control system (VCS) for each project. The limitations of this project-centric approach affect almost every translator who contributes to more than one major project, and also maintainers of projects not hosted on the main VCS of an established translation community.

Transifex is an attempt to bridge the gap between translators and disparate projects. It does this by providing a generic interface to any repository and acting as a proxy for a translation submission. Thus, a translation community is able to contribute directly to more than one upstream projects regardless of the VCS they use, and a project maintainer can easily receive translations from thousands of translators without being required to manage their accounts, relocate his code, or receive bug reports for each update to a translation.

This talk will provide an overview of the re-engineering of the translation processes in the Fedora Project, the extensions made to GNOME's Damned Lies software, and the work being done on Transifex to make the lives of translators and projects maintainers easier.