If you’re a fluent or native speaker of a language other than English, this blog post will help you learn how to get started translating Bitcoin.org so that more people around the world who speak your language can learn about Bitcoin.
Thank you to Simon AKA “Komodorpudel” for preparing content to help organize this post.
Getting Started with the Translation Team
Translations for Bitcoin.org are done on a website called Transifex. Basic instructions for how Transifex works can be found here.
Below is a summary:
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Create a free Transifex account. Creating a Transifex account is free and not much information is needed.
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Join the Bitcoin.org translation team and select the language you want to translate the site into. Your request to join a team will be accepted instantly, and you will be a translator for the language you selected. If your language is not available yet, close the pop-up, scroll down, and navigate to “Request language”.
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Play around with the interface. Transifex’s interface can be a bit confusing and it cannot hurt to take a look around. As a translator, you cannot cause any harm as you can only edit unreviewed strings. A complete history is saved for every string, making it impossible to destroy previous work. In the beginning, stay away from the Glossary as this can be edited by new translators but no history is saved.
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Join the Telegram group for translators. The website maintainer, both team leaders for translations, a number of language coordinators, and various translators are present in this group. We are happy to help in case you need assistance.
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Choose what you want to translate. Navigate to the “Dashboard” on the top of the page, then to “Languages” and select your language. You will see a lot of different resources and their progress. Each resource consists of a number of strings. A string is a “string” of text on Bitcoin.org. Each string has three possible states - “untranslated”, “translated but unreviewed”, and “reviewed”. Only the first state “untranslated” is relevant for most translators. However, if you find a “translated but unreviewed” string that contains obvious mistakes, you are free to correct them. “Reviewed” strings can only be changed or unreviewed by reviewers. The first resource “bitcoin.org” contains all strings of the main page. Start here. Everything else that follows starts with “devdocs…”, indicating that these files are part of the developer documentation. It is recommended that you only try to translate the developer documentation if you are an experienced Bitcoin user and/or developer with a profound understanding.
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Start translating. You must be a native or fluent speaker for the language you choose to translate. Please be careful to preserve the original meaning of each text. Sentences and popular expressions should sound native in your language. Translations need to be reviewed by a reviewer or coordinator before publication. Once reviewed, coordinators will notify the team leaders that a certain translation is ready for publication. If in doubt, please contact the coordinator(s) for your language on Transifex.
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Please take a look at the Responsibilities and Tasks section below to learn more about the different types of users that you’ll encounter on Transifex when helping translate Bitcoin.org.
Responsibilities and Tasks
Team Leaders
Team Leaders are currently George AKA “BitcoinTranslations” and Hendrawan AKA “khendraw”.
Responsibilities and Tasks
- Providing oversight on the complete translation efforts on Transifex.
- Keeping track of everything.
- Being a contact person for all sorts of questions that cannot be answered by language coordinators.
- Promoting or demoting users (e.g. promoting a reviewer to coordinator).
- Managing groups that have no active coordinator.
Coordinators
Various people across all language teams are coordinators. For a number of languages, no active coordinator exists. If there are any questions or you want to assist by becoming a coordinator, please write one of the team leaders.
Responsibilities and Tasks
- Translating and striving for consistency across strings.
- Providing oversight on the complete translation efforts for a specific language.
- Notifying team leaders if a resource is ready to be put on the website.
- Being a contact person for the team leaders.
- Being a contact person for all reviewers and translators within a specific language team.
- Introducing and helping new volunteers.
- Promoting or demoting users (e.g. promoting a translator to reviewer).
- Removing user that do not follow instructions (e.g. using Google Translate).
Reviewers
Responsibilities and Tasks
- Translating and striving for consistency across strings.
- Reviewing strings (preferably not their own strings if possible).
- Checking translations for correctness regarding meaning and spelling.
- Checking for consistency across translations (e.g. is “transaction malleability” translated consistently across all strings?).
Translators
Responsibilities and Tasks
- Translating and striving for consistency across strings.
- Extending the glossary with translations for necessary and general terms.
About Bitcoin.org
Bitcoin.org was originally registered and owned by Satoshi Nakamoto and Martti Malmi. When Satoshi left the project, he gave ownership of the domain to additional people, separate from the Bitcoin developers, to spread responsibility and prevent any one person or group from easily gaining control over the Bitcoin project. Since then, the site has been developed and maintained by different members of the Bitcoin community.
Despite being a privately owned site, its code is open-source and there have been over 3,200 commits from 180 contributors from all over the world. In addition to this, over 950 translators have helped to make the site display natively to visitors by default in their own languages — now 25 different languages and growing.
