freesewing/markdown/dev/guides/translation/en.md

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Translation guide

Supporting multiple languages is one of the best way to promote inclusion and accessibility. Thanks to the efforts of our community, FreeSewing is proudly multilingual.

This translation guide covers everything you need to know to join the effort of translating FreeSewing into other languages.

Supported Languages

We currently support the following five languages:

• en : English (This is our source language and the working language of the FreeSewing project)
• de : German
• es : Spanish
• fr : French
• nl : Dutch
• uk : Ukranian

Become a FreeSewing translator

To gain access as a FreeSewing translator, you will need an invite. You can request a translator invite with the link below. When you do, we will send you an email with all further instructions.

Request a FreeSewing translator invite

This link above still needs to be implemented in the new v3 website

We also have a dedicated Translation channel on Discord for any questions that may remain.

Adding a new language

We would love to make FreeSewing available in more langauges. If you are interested in starting a new translation effort, that is great.

We ask that you familiarize yourself with this translation guide to understand what it takes to add a new language. Then if you can submit your request to setup a new language with the link below.

Suggest a new FreeSewing language

This link above still needs to be implemented in the new v3 website

Get the band together

We recommend finding some like-minded people who can help translating.

While the core materials of FreeSewing can realistically be handled by one person, translating all of FreeSewing's documentation and content realistically is a job you should not undertake on your own.

Do or do not. There is no try.

There is a certain cost to adding a new language. It's not a cost in money, but rather in increased bandwidth, storage requirements, build times, repository size, test times, and so on.

It's a cost we are more than happy to pay for the benefit gaining another langauge. But it is also a cost that needs to be paid up front, at the start of the effort.

So, without wanting to discourage anyone, I would really like to avoid a scenario where people enthusiastically start working on a new languages, only to lose interest days or weeks later and see the effort falter.

With that out of the way, I hope to see many more languages being added in the future.

Translation status

The status of the ongoing translation work is available at FreeSewing.org/translation.

It's a good place to check what languages need extra help, and which are leading the scoreboard.

Content types and translation priorities

To fully translate FreeSewing, the following types of content needs to be translated:

Top priority: UX Translations
These are translations the directly impact the user experience (UX). They include the content used in design, the names of options, translations of menus, emails, and so on.

This is a relatively small amount of text, and makes up less than 10% of the top & high priority content. It's an effort that a motivated translator can complete over the course of a weekend.

High priority: Translation of Documenation
This includes all the documentation on FreeSewing.org.

This is a significant amount of text that makes up more than 90% of hte top * high priority content. It's an effort you should probably not take on by yourself, but rather tackle with a team of translators.

Low Priority: Content of blog and showcase posts
This is nice to have as people can use and navigate FreeSewing even when this content remains untranslated.

Still, if you are considering translating this content, you might want to consider the following priorities within this categors:

• First: Showcases posts. Not only do they typically have less text, their value is also less tied to how recent they are
• Then: Blog posts. Start with the most recent onces. How older a blog post gets, the less relevant it becomes

Translation through Crowdin

All of our top-priority and high-priority translation work is handled through Crowdin, an online platform to facilitate translation.

You can reach the FreeSewing project on Crowdin directly via translate.freesewing.org.

Crowdin is configured to automatically detect all of the various translation files in our repository, upload them to the platform, and break them apart into bite-sized portions that you can translate in a collaborative way. Rather than work on one large block of text, various people can jump in and translate smaller snippets,

Once translated, there is a proofreading step that will be handled by one of our proofreaders. This is often a formality, but it's an extra step to allow qulity assurance and avoid any mistakes from slipping in. Much like the code review process when you submit a pull request on GitHub.

Once your translation is approved, Crowdin will automatically submut a pull request on GitHub to update the translation files in our repository. And the next time our website or software packages get build, they will include the new translations.

Priorities of translations in Crowdin

• The top-priority translations in Crowdin are everything under the packages and sites folder. Do this first.
• The high-priory translations in Crowdin is everything under the markdown folder.

Translation through Sanity

Sanity (sanity.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 Sanity, we keep our blog and showcases posts for freesewing.org. In other words, Sanity only holds the low priority translation work.

You can reach the FreeSewing project on Crowdin directly via translate.freesewing.org.

Why we don use Crowdin for blog/showcase translations

Crowdin enforces a strict one-to-one match between the English source material and the translation.

This strict correlation is important for the UX and documenation transaltions. People expect a menu to have the same structure in all languages, and when we refer to the documentation we need to ensure that those links works for all languages, which requires that all languages use the same structure, the same amount of headings, paragraphs, and so on.

Sanity supports different language versions for posts, but it does not enforce any structure on them. A translated blog post could have more or less paragraphs, different images, you name it.

This additional freedom is why we use Sanity for these types of content. We lik to encourage the non-English FreeSewing communities to make FreeSewing their own, by writing blog posts that are relevant or specific to them, or translating blog posts not merely word-for-word, but making them relevent to their language group.

This also means that English does not have to be the source language in Sanity. 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

Questions, Suggestions, Discussion

If you have questions, suggestions, or would like to discuss translation-related matters, please join discord.freesewing.org and head to the Translation channel.