We’re excited to build on the work of our Spanish and Japanese language communities and make progress on our other target languages: French, Russian, Simplified Chinese & Portuguese.
Note: we are only temporarily deferring on translations of Arabic (the sixth UN language) until next year, due to the fact that it will require some back-end web development to support the display of right-to-left languages.
So we are now ready to work with volunteers in each of these four languages. As with Spanish and Japanese, the first phase of work will focus on translations of the user interface. We’ll rely on CrowdIn, the same tool previously used for translations of the IPT.
If you’re willing and able to contribute to the effort, please contact us at communication@gbif.org, or, even better, go ahead and join the project on CrowdIn:
- Visit https://crowdin.com/project/gbif-portal
- Click on the language you want to contribute to
- We’ll add you to the team.
We estimate that it will take approximately two person-weeks to complete UI translations for each language, so the more volunteers we have, the faster we can go.
We’ll arrange an initial orientation call late next week or early in the week of 10 September. Should anyone—particularly those of you who worked on translations of the IPT—wish to get started prior to the call, just say so. We can offer a bit of initial guidance and direction. Otherwise, our proposed schedule for this phase looks something like this:
- 19 Sept: Call for volunteers closes : in keeping with the governing board discussion at GB22, if we lack the volunteers needed to complete the UI translation, we’ll contract assistance as and where necessary.
- 1 Oct: Progress check : for those languages proceeding with volunteers, we’ll have check-in (if needed) to see whether we can complete the work by GB25; if not, again, we’ll seek help from paid contractors.
For the rest, get a baseline view of where we’re starting on our remaining targets:
Our goal is to have as much of the UI available in five UN languages (English, Spanish, French, Russian, Simplified Chinese) plus Portuguese and Japanese at the governing board, and we are committing to complete each of them by the end of 2018.
While the other languages get going, we expect to start working on ‘content’ translations with the Japanese and Spanish teams to produce the top priorities in this minimum set of required content (prioritized in consultation with the community in recent weeks).
While we have to make progress with the UI first, we don’t know how far we’ll get by the time of GB25 in content for the four languages announced today, but our goal is to have the “minimum content” available in five out of six UN languages (again, excluding Arabic) plus Japanese and Portuguese by year’s end.