Localizing our website and apps is a very important part of making elementary OS available to as many people as possible. Instead of relying solely on an internal translation team, we use crowdsourcing so that anyone can submit translations with little to no technical knowledge. In order to keep our voice consistent across the entire platform, and to help new translators get started, we’ve put together this translation guide.
## Steps to Begin Translation {#steps-to-begin-translation}Our apps and website are translated through Weblate: A libre web-based translation management system. In order to submit translations, you should:
- Have a Weblate account
- Set your language preferences
- Browse our translatable projects
Once you’ve selected a project, you can provide suggestions for strings that have not yet been translated, or suggest changes to strings that have already been translated. These suggestions will be evaluated by a translation team member and they will choose the most appropriate one. For a more info on Weblate, you can refer to its documentation.
By default, you're only able to suggest translations. If you would like to get permissions to save translations, join the translators Slack and message an admin your Weblate username and what language you want to translate.
When translating you may encounter a situation where you have to decide between several ways of saying the same thing. In these situations we refer to the Ubuntu general translator guide, and for language specific issues, we follow Ubuntu's team translation guidelines. Following these guidelines ensures uniform translations, while also allowing anyone to contribute.
If you don't want to translate using Weblate, or want to make a lot a changes at once, you can also translate offline. To do so:
- Go to a project you want to translate
- Choose your language
- Click on "Files" and then select "Download translation as gettext PO"
- Choose your favorite text-, code- or PO-editor (e.g. Poedit)
- Start translating
Once you've finished, use the "Upload translation" option in the "Files" menu on the same page you downloaded them from.
We won't support translation of the following pages: