Translating Loomio

We've always had a commitment to working with our community to steer the development of this project. The strongest message they've given us so far is ‘Loomio should be available in as many languages as possible'. So we prioritised translation, and within a few weeks a whole squad of volunteers had turned up to help out.

Since that decision to prioritise translation five months ago, Loomio is now available in ten languages, with plenty more in the works. We started to really get excited about the potential impact of this decision when we stumbled across this Loomio thread, where 76 Spanish-speakers came together to establish a set of principles for their group, ‘The Economy of the Commons':

Along the way we've learned a lot about how to manage a community-driven translation project:

• We’re using Transifex, which is proving to be an excellent translation management tool — and it’s free for open source projects!
• We’ve developed some guidelines for translators, outlining both the technical requirements and a style guide.
• We've started documenting our technical guidelines for developers, specifically covering translation using Rails.I18n and Transifex.

Translators: if you're interested in helping to translate Loomio, take a look at the guidelines and contact [email protected] if you want to get started (^_^)

Developers: if you have any questions about how we do translation, leave a comment or drop us a line (._.)

Tags: translation code report