Add automatic suggestion service for transliteration of Cyrillic script to Latin

[nijel]

Describe the problem

Several languages can be written in Cyrillic and Latin. As these are just different script for the same language, it should be possible to automatically convert these.

Describe the solution you would like

There is cyrtranslit module which can do transliteration of Cyrillic script to Latin. It can be used to automatically generate _Latn and _Cyrl translations.

Describe alternatives you have considered

No response

Screenshots

No response

Additional context

No response

[github-actions]

This issue has been added to the backlog. It is not scheduled on the Weblate roadmap, but it eventually might be implemented.

In case you need this feature soon, please consider helping or push it by funding the development.

[github-actions]

This issue seems to be a good fit for newbie contributors. You are welcome to contribute to Weblate! Don't hesitate to ask any questions you would have while implementing this.

You can learn about how to get started in our contributors documentation.

[Wells245]

Hello Nijel. I'd like to take this issue as my first open source contribution but I'm not familiar with Weblate. Could someone give me a quick overview on where in the project it goes and how it's needed to be implemented?

[nijel]

The backends live in https://github.com/WeblateOrg/weblate/tree/main/weblate/machinery

An example commit to add a new backend: fa73d22

It will just not call the remote service, but use the library. List of supported languages probably needs to be hard-coded.

[gersona]

@nijel for the sake of clarity, this issue only concerns Cyrillic to Latin transliteration right ? not in both ways

[nijel]

I think both ways make sense. The machinery should support whatever is possible with the library

[gersona]

for languages that support both Cyrillic and Latin, is the type of script always informed in the code (like "sr@cyrillic" or "bs_Cyrl")? if so, how to determine current script of code such as "sr", or should I check the actual content of the text to translate ?

[nijel]

Check language definitions in https://github.com/WeblateOrg/language-data/. Codes like sr@Latn should be used. For languages without a modifier, there usually is an existing practice whether it is Latin or Cyrillic, but I don't think we have this documented somewhere. When I need info like this I usually review translations on Hosted Weblate to see if they agree (in this case, look at https://hosted.weblate.org/languages/sr/).

[gersona]

about the MachineTranslation.max_score, since it's just transcribing from a script to another, is it safe to give it a 100 score ?

[nijel]

Yes, makes sense

[github-actions]

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