Technical Collaboration Guidance/Translation

Wikimedia projects support over two hundred languages; translations are important to distributing information about software development. There are two components to the translation process: getting the information translated for distribution, and then the actual distribution itself. These processes are documented extensively elsewhere, so summaries are provided with links to find more detailed information about the translation process.

Getting translations
Translations are primarily obtained through four ways: automated messaging on-wiki from marking a page from translation, emailing the translators' mailing list, one-to-one requests, or system messages translated through translatewiki.net. Of these four methods, generally speaking sending an email to the translators' mailing list or contacting an individual for a request are the most common way for anyone to ask for translations. Messaging through the translate extension requires a user right, and translatewiki.net is not a Wikimedia project.

Distributing translations
Announcements and calls for feedback are generally distributed through mailing lists as well as on-wiki. Unfortunately, major movement mailing lists are predominantly in English and do not support distributing translations very well, if at all. Additionally, far fewer people read mailing lists than the wikis. On-wiki messaging is the way to deliver new as well as updated information to the wider international audience.