No clear path to maintaining translations

[dontcallmedom]

There are at least two scenarios in which a translation may need or benefit from being updated:

• when the original document gets updated (which can happen even for Recommendations in a number of cases)
• when an error is spotted in the translation

The previous system did not provide a workflow to coordinate these updates; among other things, there was no easy way:

• to determine if changes were brought to the original document since the document was translated
• to determine where to send feedback to the translator, nor if that feedback was taken into account
• to take over the maintenance of a translation if the said translator was no longer able or interested in doing that work

[dontcallmedom]

In the new approach, a translation, once published, would live in a W3C github repository where both the original translator but also other translators of that language could keep working on the document to improve it over time.

The tracking of changes provided by github also allows to determine when a translation was last updated, and in particular, if it needs updates to match changes in the original document (the degree of automation for that determination will likely depend on specifying conventions for tracking these updates).