Help us translate

Requirements for volunteer translators:

• Being fluent in spoken and written language you intend to translate to
• Being dedicated to seeing the translation process through to the end, as well as continuously maintaining translated files
• Having an account in Crowdin – it’s free and easy. For an introduction to using Crowdin, check out https://support.crowdin.com/crowdin-intro/

Translation workload:

• Initial translation of the UI: approximately a week to translate the app to your language, around 30 hours from start to finish – of course it depends on your speed of translation but on average, let’s say around 7 evenings, ~4 hours each. Of course, a group of volunteers would complete this so much quicker than one single person, so grab a friend if possible! 🙂 The platform allows for simultaneous translation whenever and wherever.
• Maintenance: approximately 30 minutes on a weekly basis (sometimes more, sometimes less) to update translations

Translation process:

If your language doesn’t exist on our platform yet, please send us a note to let us know you intend to start translating, so that we could open your language for translation on Crowdin for you. A brief description of who you are and what drew you to our platform would be most appreciated!

We love to get to know our volunteers ❤️

Sign up for a Crowdin account and join these projects:

Sign up here.

• Frontend project (FE) – the main UI of the platform
• API – platform’s transactional emails (which are sent, for example, when a user registers an account, or is invited to participate in a discussion on the platform)
• Etherpad – the small external widget within the platform, which allows to format the text when creating content on the platform

NB! Please start translating from the file called “Glossary” (shown in the image below), which you’ll find in the project FE.

It’s the most important file, containing all the terms you will be meeting on and on in all translatable files during the translation process, and it’s of utmost importance, that the terms are translated consistently – this will ensure you have a strong base for the rest of translations and will make your work process a lot easier 🙂

Refer to the 3 projects, linked above – they form the complete app, so they have to be all 100% translated in order for Citizen OS to push the language live on the app 🙂

We’ve recorded a tutorial on how to translate on Crowdin a while ago – please kindly watch it before translating 🙂
Crowdin has updated the look of the platform ever since, but it’s still good to get a feel of what the translating process looks like.

Things to note:

• If you meet any strings that look similar to this: “@:TXT_TOPIC_LEVELS_ADMIN” – these are reference strings and are non-translatable. You’re free to leave them empty.

• You’re absolutely welcome to ask for help/more information, or report an issue with a string by leaving a comment under a string’s translation view.

• Please tag our Localization Lead – Oksana Naidjonova – when submitting any comments during translation. Just start your comment in Crowdin with @unicode and she will get an email notification about it. This will ensure most timely response