Translators

Becoming member of a translation team

If you are interested in being part of a translation team, please send an email to the official translation mailing list (typo3.translation.general) with your typo3.org username and your preferred language team.

All communication to translators about deadlines, features, changes etc. coming from the core team will be announced on this list. The list is also for discussions among translators themselves, of course. Translations are done by translating core or extensions on a separate translation server. The language files are synchronised daily to the Extensions Repository (TER). The translations will be available from the Extension Manager in the TYPO3 Back End.

If you want another language added, please report that on the above-mentioned mailing list.

Before you engage, please be aware that translating is a huge task. A minimum requirement is that you are willing to maintain the core translation and the most common and popular extensions as well. Further, you should look out for assisting translators who can help you do it.

The Basic Process of Translating TYPO3 (Core and Extensions)

We Are All Translators

The translation server, based on Pootle, allows every community member to suggest new translations in any language. This has been made possible thanks to single sign-on authentication (SSO) between the Pootle translation server and the user accounts on typo3.org. Pootle is a user-friendly web portal that makes the translation process easy. It allows online translation, generates statistics, and allows you to contribute.

If you encounter a mistake, or believe that certain text could be better translated, you can contribute by suggesting your corrections. The translation team of that language will then validate your contributions as part of their translation review workflow. However, if you stumble upon something wrong and cannot find a proper, immediate alternative, just mark the corresponding string as fuzzy — this way, the rest of the team will realize that the translation should be reworked.

Translating is perhaps the easiest way to contribute to an open-source community and you will be surprised how many features are provided by Pootle to help you in this regard. Try it out today!

Inspire People to Translate

The XLIFF/Pootle project is aimed at providing the teams with a set of translation tools. These tools will be made available to help extension developers convert existing translations into Pootle-compatible files. The translation server is able to provide both new XLIFF-based translation and standard locallang.xml files, ensuring a complete compatibility with all TYPO3 installations.

XLIFF is a normalized translation format based on an XML structure. If working online with Pootle is not the best option for you, you may use offline tools or desktop applications such as Virtaal to improve your translation workflow and take advantage of advanced services such as translation memories.

You can also check the new translation team project on Forge. If you have any problem with the translation server, please open an issue on Forge: http://forge.typo3.org/projects/team-translation. In the future, contributing to translations will be possible from any local system where a person chooses to install the "llxmltranslate" extension and has translated labels for any extension, either core or third-party. The Extension Manager will be able to "commit" a translation to the translation repository "inbox" in TER from where it can be merged into the official language pack by the official translator team.

The philosophy is that extensions are translated by anyone in the context where a user needs it - on his own system! And after translating, a single click of a button allows him to contribute the translation to the community.