I am, these days, sporadically, working at translating the UI of the MuseScore music notation software into Romanian.

The software itself is opensource, written in C++ against the QT platform, and translation, up to a few days ago, was made via the QTLinguist application.

The QTLinguist has a rather priceless feature, called suggestions (or the like), which saves much of translator’s precious time. It simply recognizes strings that you have previously translated and prompts you to choose (one of) the translation(s) you already entered for it.

Recently, the project’s stakeholder decided to switch to a web based translation tool (I’m not sure if it’s a home-made web application or a dedicated/commercial one). While this speeds things a lot, the suggestions feature QT had is, of course, missing, and I’m actually missing it the most.

Which brings me to the point I wanted to state when I first decided to put together this post: Isn’t there a smarter i18n tool/platform/API that would prevent the programmer from redundantly entering the same string several times in an application’s UI? I’d really like to know.