For years, anyone who wanted to contribute translations to Odoo was directed to Transifex, a popular SaaS platform for managing open-source localization projects. That’s changing. Odoo has stood up its own Weblate server at translate.odoo.comand is actively migrating all translation workflows away from Transifex and onto infrastructure it fully controls.
The shift touches every major repository in the Odoo ecosystem: the core odoo/odoocodebase, the enterprise edition, design themes, and the official documentation. It’s not a small-scale experiment — it’s a platform-wide infrastructure change that affects how hundreds of community translators interact with the project.
Why Weblate, and Why Now
Weblate is an open-source, web-based translation management system that integrates directly with version control. Unlike Transifex, which operates as a standalone SaaS product, Weblate can be self-hosted and configured to sync bidirectionally with GitHub repositories. That last part is the key difference.
With Transifex, the translation workflow had a natural friction point: translations lived on Transifex’s servers, and getting them back into the repository required periodic export-import cycles managed through a .tx/configfile. Translators worked in Transifex’s interface, and the results eventually made their way into the codebase through a synchronization process that was neither instant nor transparent.
Weblate collapses that gap. A new weblate.jsonconfiguration file in the repository defines the sync relationship, and changes flow between the translation interface and the GitHub repository without manual intervention. When a translator updates a string on translate.odoo.com, the change can be committed directly to the repository. When a developer adds new translatable strings in a commit, they appear in Weblate automatically.
The Migration Is Already Underway
The technical groundwork landed in two coordinated changes. First, a weblate.jsonconfiguration file was added to the repository, establishing the sync relationship between GitHub and the new Weblate instance. This file tells Weblate which translation files to watch, how they’re structured, and where to push completed translations.
Second, all contributor-facing references to Transifex were replaced with the new translate.odoo.com URL. The contributing guidelines, developer tutorials, and any documentation that previously linked to transifex.com/odoo/now points to the Weblate instance instead. For anyone following a “how to contribute translations” tutorial, the destination changed overnight.
The old .tx/configfile remains in the repository temporarily — a transitional measure while any remaining Transifex synchronization processes are wound down. It’s marked for removal once the migration is fully complete.
What This Means for Contributors
If you’ve been contributing translations through Transifex, the practical change is straightforward: go to translate.odoo.com instead. Weblate’s interface is functionally similar — you browse projects, select a language, and work through untranslated or fuzzy strings in a web-based editor. The translation memory, glossary, and quality checks work comparably to what Transifex offered.
The deeper change is about control and responsiveness. When the translation platform is self-hosted, the Odoo team can customize the workflow, adjust quality gates, manage user permissions, and respond to issues without filing support tickets with a third-party vendor. If a particular language needs a custom glossary or a specialized review process, that’s a configuration change, not a feature request.
A Pattern in Open Source
Odoo isn’t the first major open-source project to make this move. Several large projects have migrated from commercial localization platforms to self-hosted Weblate instances over the past few years, driven by similar motivations: tighter integration with development workflows, better control over the translation pipeline, and elimination of vendor dependencies for a critical part of the release process.
For a project that ships in dozens of languages and relies on community translators across every continent, the translation platform isn’t a peripheral tool — it’s core infrastructure. Owning it outright, rather than renting it from a SaaS provider, is the kind of move that pays dividends over years, even if the migration itself is a slog.
The transition is happening now. If you’re a translator who’s been contributing to Odoo through Transifex, update your bookmarks. The new home is translate.odoo.com, and it’s already accepting contributions.