What’s the best way to fix a single source of truth for our translation project?

[Samuel_P]

I’ve been trying to organize a community-led translation of an open-source app, but the version control in our shared document is a complete mess. I’m worried that without a single source of truth, all our volunteer work will get overwritten or lost.

[Mark_L]

I get the sense you’re fighting the same drift we had last year. Our shared doc turned into a constellations of edits and someone’s change got overwritten every other Tuesday. We picked one person to own the translation area and started a simple changelog, plus a visible queue of what’s waiting. It helped a bit, but the history still felt fragile and you could never see who touched what last.

[Ronald53]

The mess felt less about the tool and more about how we worked together. I’ve seen people freeze up because there was no clear signal of what was expected, so edits piled up and got reworked. We kept saying we’d fix it, but momentum died.

[Ronald13]

For us the turning point was moving to a real repo for translations. We had a glossary file and every translated string in a file, then used pull requests to review changes. There was a simple status page and an auto check that strings wouldn’t break the app. It didn't solve every edge case, but it cut overwrite chaos and gave us a reliable history.

[NoraJL]

I’ve even wandered into other things, like debating font sizes in a local doc, then snapping back to who approves merges. Maybe the root problem isn’t the doc at all, but who feels responsible for keeping it clean. Is ownership the real bottleneck here?