Project:About

translatewiki.net is a translation community and a localisation platform for free and open source projects. It started out with localisation for MediaWiki. Later support was added for MediaWiki extensions, FreeCol, and other free and open source projects. See the complete list of supported projects.

translatewiki.net is an independent open source project. The translation functionality is provided by the MediaWiki extension Translate. This wiki always contains experimental code, and may be broken occasionally. Please be patient, problems are usually dealt with quickly. Issues can be reported at the Support page.

Why use translatewiki.net

The best translation tool available on the web. All localisation updates happen on an easy interface, and there are people around who can help translators. When making a translation, hints to understand its correct meaning and use are provided, as well as suggestions from translation memory and machine translation services.
No particular privileges required, everyone can contribute. Everyone who can contribute in a language (see below) is allowed to help with the localisation of that language.
Keeping track of changes is easy. Untranslated messages are not the only easily found: whenever the source text changes, the affected translations are tagged for easy identification. Translators do not have to spend time digging what needs doing.

Add your software project on translatewiki.net if it's not yet.

Overview of translatewiki.net method

On translatewiki.net, translators translate the interface of software for products where the English text strings have been isolated from the code and have been organized into individual "messages".
When a new project joins, the English source messages are imported, as well as any existing translations. New and changed English messages are imported multiple times a day.
Message documentation is written manually and is usually of better quality where good communication exists with the original software developer team. If source code comments are part of a software project, these are also displayed in the translation interface.
Translators make suggestions to improve or correct an original English message, or adapt it to support localisation. If agreed, these are either implemented by translatewiki.net members who are also developers on the relevant project, or reported to the project developers.
Completed translations for each language are "committed" to the projects by translatewiki.net staff, as soon as the total number of translations for a project in that language has passed the threshold agreed for that project. For frequency of committing and thresholds see the project page of the project in question.
The software release of translations which have been committed to a project is controlled and executed by the project administrators and is out of the hands of translatewiki.net.

Copyright and disclaimers

TRANSLATEWIKI.NET MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY

Use the translations in translatewiki.net at your own risk. They are intended to be useful but translatewiki.net cannot guarantee the validity of the content found here.

translatewiki.net and its editors do not provide any warranty on the contents whatsoever, whether expressed, implied, or statutory, including, but not limited to, any warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose or any warranty that the contents will be error-free.

Translations by translators are licensed CC BY 3.0, and derivative works may also be licensed under the licenses of the respective Free and Open Source projects the translations have been or will be added to. Content of user pages are considered to be "All rights reserved" by the author. All other content is licensed CC BY 3.0 unless a different license or copyright is stated explicitly.

History

translatewiki.net started in 2006 as a test wiki, developed by Niklas Laxström, in collaboration with Gangleri, as an internationalisation and localisation tool for the MediaWiki software. It started under the name Betawiki, which became translatewiki.net at the beginning of 2009, following the site's move to virtual server hosting under its own domain name on November 9, 2007. By October 2007, translatewiki.net was contributing to localisation in around 70 languages, which by June 2010 had grown to 329 languages. How the number of languages has grown is visible in the table of translation milestones passed for MediaWiki. By January 2010, an upgrade was needed to the server capacity to cope with the increase in activity. Netcup has generously hosted translatewiki.net since November 2007.

Other free and open source projects have gradually been added to translatewiki.net, starting with FreeCol in August 2007. By June 2010, the number of projects supported had grown to 16, and by December 2019, this number had grown to 46.

Most contributors to translatewiki.net are volunteers. Developers, administrators, and translators were initially recruited from MediaWiki projects, especially Wikimedia. Most of our contributors still arrive here via MediaWiki, but with more projects arriving all the time, MediaWiki is no longer the only source of contributors. By June 2010, the number of registered translators was 1,860. In June 2018, the number of registered translators is 19,000.

In collaboration with Stichting Open Progress and FUDforum, translatewiki.net has arranged several translation rallies with bounties for translators available to improve the localisation of MediaWiki and FUDforum.

In 2008 the Dutch NGO Hivos provided funding via Stichting Open Progress. The grant was to be used to provide bounties for translations in a list of 70 to 80 languages spoken in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that had a sizable number of speakers, but insufficient support in MediaWiki.
At the end of 2008, an end-of-year translation rally open to all translators was held.
During August 2009, another translation rally was organized, funded by Wikimedia Nederland, the Dutch Wikimedia chapter.
Wikimedia Nederland also funded the 2009 end-of-year rally.

The aims of translatewiki.net are described on the Introduction page. Technological aids to translators are described on the Technology page. These aids are continually being expanded and improved in order to make the translation work as efficient as possible. Current site needs and development are described on Phabricator.

Funding

translatewiki.net is kindly hosted by Netcup – webspace and vServer, at their expense since November 2007, with upgrades in February 2008, January 2010, October 2013, July 2015 and December 2019.
Stichting Open Progress and others have from time to time organized funding for translation rallies to improve the localisation of MediaWiki and others, as explained above.
In 2012 the Wikimedia Foundation Language team worked on a project called Translation UX in which the translatewiki.net main page and our translation interface were replaced by modern, professionally designed and user tested versions.
Niklas Laxström and Siebrand Mazeland are or have been working for the Wikimedia Foundation and have contributed to translatewiki.net during their work time.

People behind translatewiki.net

Core team

Core team members are involved almost daily running translatewiki.net. They are responsible for making things run with as few problems as possible. For more information please see the succession plan.

We thank the following individuals for their significant contributions:

Niklas Laxström: Founder, all kinds of work
Siebrand Mazeland: Community manager, project coordinator, developer
Raimond Spekking: Translation committer for MediaWiki, developer

We also depend on the work done by other members of our community:

Gangleri – Early visionary. No longer active.
GerardM – Ambassador, publicity using direct contact, blogs, StatusNet, Twitter. No longer active.
All contacts in individual projects
All translators and other members of this project

Contact us

You can leave a message on our main discussion page at Support. If you prefer a live discussion, you can join our chat channel either via Telegram or #translatewiki IRC channel on Libera.Chat. Not preferred, but if needed for security or privacy reasons, you can use the email address translatewikitranslatewiki.net.

You can discuss issues concerning a particular language with its translators on the talk page of the language portal.
You can discuss issues concerning a particular project with its supporters and the developer liaison on the talk page of the project page.
You can discuss issues with individual users on their user talk page, or by e-mail (click on the e-mail link in the sidebar on a user page), if they have chosen to allow e-mail.