Anyone know crowdsourced/collaborative translation platform?

Hello,

We’ve gotten quite a few volunteers who want to translate some Fairphone materials in other languages - from Catalan to Welsh to French. Internally, the Fairphone team is looking into online collaborative platforms that would facilitate mass/crowdsourced translations.

But maybe you already know such a platform and would recommend one to us? Thanks to everyone already who has expressed interest in helping translate!

Dear Joe,

Can you explain what you mean? I’ve never heard of a online collaborative platform. I can guess what it’s all about but I’m not too sure.

I think some open source software projects use Transifex.

3 Likes

Hi,

I know that the WordPress community uses GlotPress as translation plateform. You can find the source files in GitHub (https://github.com/GlotPress/GlotPress)

I’ve used the tool as part of the WordPress translation community for a while and it’s quite easy. I’ve never installed or configured it though.

I guess you can also find WordPress plugins.

If you need help with the French translation, feel free to contact me. I’d love to help you.

Thanks for your great work.

Laurent,

2 Likes

Hi @Fairlulu,

Maybe check out the examples the others list to get an idea what I mean. It’s basically a tool that would allow group contributions to translating material from English to another language. This could be small things, like language in our operating system, or how-to tutorials (scripted subtitles on our YouTube videos), or a certain language fact sheet.

It’s a way that a lot of other community-supported, small startups have done it because it’s so hard for us to be able to accommodate full language support in many languages.

1 Like

Sounds great! Looking forward to it. Hope I’ll be able to help.

I am sure that we will be a lot to help translating the website, the videos and maybe also to improve the Fairphone software translation. I hope that a good platform will be found soon so that we have translated all before the release of the next gen !
I think that a significant part of the population (especially French, that’s true) doesnt know Fairphone just because there is no official presentation website in their language.

Hello,

I’m not sure I completely understood what you’re lookig for. Anyway, I’ve found this nonprofit association (http://www.softcatala.org/) which works on the development, translation to Catalan and distribution of different programmes and it’s open to anyone who wants to participate.

Hopw you find it interesting!

2 Likes

Hi Joe;

I think I know excactly what you mean… I’ve been helping with the Dutch translation of the DUmeter program, through such a platform; I’ll PM you the URL and E-mail address; maybe these folks can help you further…

Success!

Rob.

2 Likes

Ik wil héél erg graag dat alle info ook in het Nederlands te vinden zou zijn. Ik kan me er echt aan ergeren dat jullie dat niet doen. UIk weet niet hoe dat in Nederland zit, maar in België is het verplicht.
Sat kleine startgidsje dat wel beschikbaar is daar ben je niets mee.

@Denise_Hoedemakers Did you see the interactive tutorials? These are also available in Dutch.

Dank u, nee ik had die niet gevonden.
groeten
denise

1 Like

@joe: is there already a way for community members to contribute on an continuing basis (e.g. for support pages or the interactive tutorials)?

Hey @Stefan - no not yet.

A team member, @anon33192704, is going to work on a pilot project for translation, researching opportunities for crowdsourcing. I’ll leave it to him to give an update.

1 Like

Hi Joe,

I’m the Community Manager for OpenSignal, and we’re also crowdsourcing our translations - we use a system called Pootle, which you can host yourself, and it works quite well for submitting translations online. (In my experience, the only thing to note is that if people don’t want to submit translations online, but download the translation files, translate them, and then upload the translated files themselves, then unless you have a before and after of the files or the database, you won’t know who submitted the entries and won’t be able to track the change in word count.)

So, here is the Pootle demo: http://pootle.locamotion.org/
And here is the Pootle organisation website: http://pootle.translatehouse.org/

Hope this helps.

Best,

Teresa

3 Likes

We use Pootle for Spybot translations as well. Strictly for software translations only currently, in combination with GNU gettext. In this combination, it just rocks, and finally solves issues we had with previous systems that wouldn’t easily allow teams to contribute to the same language.

I’m unsure how it would perform with other kinds of texts, e.g. manuals. That would most likely depend on another software interfacing with the gettext (or another supported) format, which is not part of Pootle.

1 Like

Thanks for the comments so far, everyone. Pootle looks interesting. The key is to have something user-friendly I think, so I’ll have to do some testing here.

Our Berlin meetup is tomorrow, so hopefully we can get some input from people to see the interest for crowdsourcing some translations.

Thanks again-

1 Like