Help

Welcome to Translate.

Translate is an online resource which enables community translations of a website or other software.

Your administrator will tell you how to log on to the system; you will either be given a username and password, or you will be asked to use the same credentials you use for another website.

Your translations are organised into “files” and “strings”.

Strings are snippets of text used on the website which will be translated into your language.

Files are groups of related strings, for example these might be all the strings used on a particular screen of the website, or all the strings used in a menu.

When you log onto the translation website, you should initially see a list of files.  Within each file, you should see a list of the languages which you are translating, the date the file was last updated, and a progress bar showing how many translations have been completed.

Click the language name in the file to see all the strings that need to be translated.

Each string to be translated is shown in a box; sometimes there is some explanatory text shown under the string – you should not include this text in your translation.

Translations are given one of three statuses:

• Green: The translation is good
• Amber: A minor change has been made to the string since the last time it was translated, your translation will still be used, but you should check whether or not it needs to be updated.
• Red: A major change has been made to the string since the last time it was translated, your translation will not be used, and you should update it.

You should enter your translation in the textbox, as you enter text you will notice that the textbox changes colour – this means that the text you have entered has not yet been saved and you should not navigate away from this page or you will lose your work.

When entering translations, please try to preserve all placeholders and HTML mark-up.

There are four buttons over the textbox:

• Save: This will save your work to the database, the colour of the textbox will change back to white to indicate that there are no unsaved changes.
• Paste: This button pastes the original text into the textbox – you may wish to do this if the translation is very similar to the original text.
• Cancel: This will roll back the changes you have made to the translation since it was last saved.
• Lookup: This button will look up a machine translation of the string and enter it into the textbox (not available for all languages).

For some languages, there is also a dropdown box showing variations to that language; for example if you are translating Spanish, you may see entries like “Spanish (Argentina)” or “Spanish (Peru)”.  Clicking one of these entries will bring up a new translation box.

You should only use variations if there are significant variations between counties in the translated text; normally you should leave these boxes blank and only enter the translation in the main box.

To see your overall progress, click ”Overall Progress” on the main menu.