i18n — English-only today, Weblate Hosted Libre when ready

decision Sat Jun 20 2026 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) decisionsbrandingi18nweblatedeferred-then-locked

i18n — English-only today, Weblate Hosted Libre when ready

Decision

The chirag127/oriz family is English-only across every site and extension today. No translation-management platform is in the hot path. When a site or extension picks up real non-English audience demand, the family flips on Weblate Hosted Libre as the chosen tool.

This revisits and refines the earlier deferral at services/business/i18n/tolgee.md: the "defer i18n" call still holds, but the which tool when ready is now answered — Weblate, not Tolgee.

Why

• No use case today. No site has measurable non-English traffic. Tooling without a job is dead weight; pre-translating English copy nobody asked for is also dead weight.
• When demand arrives, we want a free / OSS / no-card option ready. Weblate Hosted Libre is free for libre projects on a public git repo — fits every family rule (no card-on-file,, no paid tiers).
• Why Weblate over Tolgee: Hosted Libre is a public-good tier with no quota cliff at family scale. Tolgee's SaaS free tier exists but has lower limits, and its self-hosted option is ruled out by the . The Weblate self-host option is excluded by the same rule — Hosted Libre is the rule-compliant variant.
• PR-back-to-the-repo workflow matches how every other content change in the family already flows. Translators land PRs in GitHub; the same review surface covers code and copy.

Implications

• No i18n integration in any site or extension today. Sites ship English copy as plain literals. No messages.json, no locale switcher, no lang= selector logic in oriz-kit.
• When the first site needs i18n (a future judgment call, not a scheduled milestone):
  1. Extract that site's user-visible strings into a single src/locales/en.json (or .po).
  2. Apply for Hosted Libre under that public repo's slug.
  3. Wire Weblate's GitHub integration; translations land as PRs.
  4. Add a locale switcher to the site (component lives in @chirag127/oriz-kit once shape is clear; first site eats the temporary in-repo version).
• No site-wide locale switcher in oriz-kit yet — the component lands when the first site needs it, not pre-emptively.
• Tolgee stays rejected in the service catalog. The services/business/i18n/tolgee.md page cross-links to weblate as the picked replacement.
• No URL changes today. When i18n flips on for a given site, the locale strategy (/en/ prefix vs lang.site.tld vs cookie) is decided per-site at flip-on time — not pre-emptively here.

Cross-refs

• services/business/i18n/weblate-hosted-libre.md — the picked service
• services/business/i18n/tolgee.md — earlier deferral, kept rejected
• services/business/i18n/index.md — bucket policy
• No card-on-file rule