Contributing translations as a community member
A translation reaches every user of a language, often people who would never read an English manual. It is one of the contributions where a single person makes the largest difference.
Contents
- What can be translated
- Translating the interface
- Translating the help
- Working as a language team
- Quality
What can be translated
| What | Where | Page |
|---|---|---|
| The administration's messages | share/translations/<locale>/translation.ts, one file per language | Contributing translations (supporters) |
| An extension's messages | The extension's own translations/ directory | same |
| The documentation and this help | doc/<locale>/, for example doc/ger-de/ for German | Reading help in other languages |
Which locales exist and how complete each is: doc/eng-us/languages.md and the help page
Languages.
Translating the interface
- Check the completeness of your language.
- Fork the repository and open the language's
translation.ts. - Translate the untranslated or unfinished messages. Keep placeholders such as
%1exactly as they are. - Switch the administration to your language and look at the screens you translated.
- Commit with a prefixed message, such as
Updated: German translation of the help dashboard, and open a pull request (Contributing code).
For right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, check the layout as well as the words (Right-to-left).
Translating the help
The help is free documentation, so you may translate it (Free documentation). A
translated page lives under doc/<locale>/ with the same relative path as the English page, or with a translated
file name listed in doc/<locale>/.paths.json; a page the reader's language does not have yet is shown in English
with a note (settings/exphelp.ini, [DocLanguages]). Agree with the maintainers in an issue before you translate
many pages.
Working as a language team
- Find other speakers in the forums or chats and agree on terms before you start.
- Keep a short glossary of the terms your translation uses.
- Divide the work by screen or by help section, not by alphabet.
- Review each other's work before it is submitted.
Quality
- Consistency matters more than elegance; reuse the terms already in the translation.
- Product names stay as they are: Exponential, 7x, the Exponential Foundation.
- Do not submit machine translations without review. The code of conduct asks you to check AI-assisted work and say when a substantial part was generated (Reviewing a machine-assisted translation).
Related pages
- Contributing as a community member
- Helping with translations
- Translations and languages
- Languages
- Free documentation: this page is free to copy, translate and improve under the GNU FDL 1.3.
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