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| Translation guide |
Freesewing.org is proudly multilingual, and we currently support five languges. For this, we rely on the work of our translators who volunteer their time to translate FreeSewing into various languages from English, which is our source language.
This translation guide will tell you everything you need to know to join the effort as a translator for FreeSewing.
TL;DR: Becoming a FreeSewing translator
Our translation project on Crowdin is accessible via translate.freesewing.org.
To get started, you will need to be invited as a translator. No need to worry, simply let us know you'd like to help out and we'll add you.
For access to Strapi, you will need an account on our Strapi instance. Here too, Discord is the place to let us know you'd like to help out.
Bonus: You'll get an @freesewing.org email alias
Languages
We currently support the following five languages:
- en : English
- de : German
- es : Spanish
- fr : French
- nl : Dutch
If you'd like to start working on a new language, that's great, but a bit beyond the scope of this documentation. Before you start working on a new language please come and talk to us on Discord.
Translation in Crowdin vs Strapi
We use two different tools to manage our translations, depending on the context:
- Markdown content and code strings in our monorepo are translated within Crowdin
- Blog and showcase posts are translated within Strapi
Translation priorities
If you'd like to help out, please join our translation team on Crowdin.
While it can be nice to have blog and showcase posts translated, these are less important than the translation work in Crowdin which is about the documentation and strings that allow people to use FreeSewing.org in a different language.
Crowdin
Most translation happens in Crowdin (crowdin.com), an online translation platform that makes translation and collaboration a breeze.
In Crowdin, all text is broken up into lines, words or paragraphs, that are than translated. This does not only facilitate collaboration — as rather than work on one large block of text various people can jump in and translate smaller snippets — it also enforces a strict one-on-one match between the English source material and the translation.
This strict correlation is important. People who refer to the documentation in a different language expect to find the same structure, the same amount of headings, paragraphs and so on.
Strapi
Strapi (strapi.io) is a so-called headless content management system (CMS). Headless just means that we load the content from it via an API, rather than have it be part of our website like a classic CMS (eg. Wordpress).
In Strapi, we keep our blog posts and showcases for FreeSewing.org. We also keep our newsletter editions there and developer blog posts for FreeSewing.dev there, but since those are not translated, we will ignore them in this guide.
Strapi supports different language versions for posts, but it's not a translation system like Crowdin that breaks text down into small parts to translate. Instead, each post can be translated as a whole, and there is not enforcement whatsover of structure or content between the different language versions.
In other words, a translated blog posts could use a different structure, or even different images. This is by design, because we want to encourage the different (non-English) FreeSewing communities to make FreeSewing their own, by writing blog posts that are relevant or specific to them.
This also means that English does not have to be the source language in Strapi. Somebody could write a French blog post (for example) which can then be translated to English.
Syntax
Most strings are just text, but sometimes you'll find a little markup sprinkled in.
HTML formatting
When you encounter HTML tags, simply translate around them. For example:
<b>No</b>, never.
looks like this in Spanish:
<b>No</b>, nunca.
Placeholders
When you encounter a {key} between curly braces, leave it as-is.
These will be filled in later with the correct value. For example:
{field} saved
looks like this in Spanish
{field} guardado