Translation Teams & Language Packs

Changes to the translation organisation

A word of thanks

Over the past months there has been a significant amount of people who have become more and more involved with e107. This is great news and highly appreciated!

In order to stimulate and facilitate collaboration among all volunteers, e107 tries to offer the best platforms given the restraints in resources such as time and money. As a first step, the organisation of the e107 translations has recently undergone some changes. More improvements to other areas will follow in due time.

Translation organisation

Thanks to our volunteers in the community, great efforts have been made to publish language packs for the latest releases of e107. To further support and coordinate the development of language packs, a new Github organisation has been created: ‘e107translations’. This organisation houses the official translations of e107.

Translators are strongly encouraged to use this platform so all translations can be effectively managed and published. Each translation team has the freedom to decide how they would like to manage their specific translation and are not bound to use the Github organization for the development process. However, to be recognised as an official language pack, the final version of each language pack has to be uploaded to the Github repository.

To clarify, each translation team can choose how they want manage their own translation. This means that if you are using another way to create your language pack, you can continue to do so. Only the final version of a translation needs to be uploaded to the Github organisation.

In case you or your team are already using your own Github repository, it can be easily transferred directly into the e107translations organisation while maintaining all existing data as well as all ownership rights that you had previously. The change is purely meant to make sure all translations are stored in one place as this enhances coordination and facilitates collaboration among all translators and volunteers.

Using this platform has numerous advantages, including:

• Coordination: each translation team has a coordinator assigned who is the contact person for a specific translation. Also, there will be one central place where the official translations can be downloaded. A list of teams and coordinators will be published as soon as possible.
• Use of Github tools such as pull-requests, issue discussions and wiki’s which enables and encourages collaboration. Every individual is able to contribute to a translation by submitting pull-requests for instance. Additionally, team coordinators can use the wiki or issues to determine standards and to communicate with the users of a translation.
• It allows for further integration of the translations into the core of e107. By using Github as a platform, next steps such as integrating automatic updates of translations into e107 can be achieved more easily.

What is needed and how can you contribute?

If you are currently translating e107 into a specific language and you already have translated previous versions, please get in touch with me (Moc). The best way to contact me is through Gitter but you can also send me an email on moc [at] e107.org. This way we can exchange the necessary information and provide you with the appropriate permissions for the Github repository to allow you to manage the translation in however way you want to.

If you are interested in contributing to a particular translation which is currently not available or not finished, please contact the coordinator for the specific language that is being translated into. A full list of the all the teams can be found on the organisation's team's page. If you cannot find the coordinator, please contact me. If the team is using Github repositories, you can easily contribute by submitting so-called pull requests. More info on those can be found through the links which are added at the end of this post.

Once again, thank you community for providing the currently available translation of e107. Being able to use e107 in your own language stimulates the growth of e107 across borders and should be highly valued.

Feedback on the changes that were made is greatly appreciated. Please join in our Gitter chatroom to have a chat. This is also the place to go to if you have any questions about the new translation organisation structure.

Useful resources

To learn more about how Github works and to find more information on the translation standards of e107, please check the following links:

• The Guides platform of Github, in particular ‘Understanding the Github Flow’ & ‘Forking Projects’
• Language standards in e107

Thanks again, and see you soon.

Moc