Make the user that triggered the bulk automatic translation the author

[michael-smt]

Describe the problem

When using the bulk automatic translation, all actions (suggestions or actual translations) come from a technical mt:<provider> user.

This makes it impossible to have traceability who actually initiated and is responsible for these translation.

Solution brainstorm

• Make the user who initiated the bulk automatic translation the author of any suggestions.
• Make the user also the author in commit messages.
  • Add the provider used in the commit message, possibly with the Generated-by: or Co-authored-by: tags.
• Track the machinery used for the translation in a separate metadata field and show it on suggestions.
• Get rid of the "technical" mt:<provider> users.

Describe alternatives you have considered

• Add the user to a new metadata field and keep the author as-is: would also be possible, but makes authorship searches more difficult. The user should also be added with a Signed-off-by: or some other form in the commit.
• Only log the triggering of the bulk automatic translation with the user to the component's history: makes it cumbersome to find out who did it by having to first scroll through a possibly very long list of automatic translations in the history first.

Screenshots

Suggestion from a automatic translation with DeepL:

Commit message from a automatic translation with DeepL:

Author: DeepL <noreply-mt-deepl@weblate.org>
Date:   Wed Jun 25 11:20:47 2025 +0000

    Translated using Weblate (Portuguese)

    Currently translated at 100.0% (33 of 33 strings)

    Translation: My Project/My Component
    Translate-URL: https://example.com/projects/my-project/my-component/pt/

Additional context

No response

[nijel]

There are add-on triggered translations, where there is no “responsible” user for that.

Weblate tracks separately author and user for changes, so the data might already be there, it's just not displayed.

[michael-smt]

Thanks for the feedback.

There are add-on triggered translations, where there is no “responsible” user for that.

Good point. Maybe for this case, having a "add-on user" per instance of the add-on might make sense, as it's the add-on that is the actor. So each place (component, project, global) where a add-on is configured gets it's own technical user. Then when the same add-on does e.g. suggestions with two different machine translation engines as source, these are appearing from the same add-on user instead of from two different engine users.