Transifex Pairs Translators with Open Source Projects

by Lisa Hoover - Jan. 03, 2011Comments (0)

Look at the wish list of just about any open source project and you'll see requests for translation on just about all of them. If that's one of the pain points of your project, then you'll want to take a look at web-based open translation platform, Transifex.net. Designed for small to medium open source projects, Transifex.net brings contributors interested in doing some translation work together with the projects that need them.

After registering with the site (it's free), developers can add their projects in just a few clicks. Translators can easily find projects to get involved with by browsing all available projects or searching by specific name. There are all kinds of open source projects to join, from video platforms and games to genealogy applications and photo organizers. Community members will also recognize several popular projects, including the MeeGo mobile operating system and the Django web framework.

If you prefer to host Transifex on your own server, download the most recent version, Mojo, that includes a batch of handy new features:

* A new Extension Engine allows developers to write plug-and-play ‘addons’ which can extend or override parts of the core functionality, and improve extensibility, code readability and on-demand scalability.
* Team Sharing: A project can now reuse the language teams another project, allowing the full support of larger, ‘umbrella’ communities like MeeGo.
* New supported i18n directory structures, such as PO directories named by the locale code, the LC_MESSAGES locale standard, grouped and suffixed language files, and the Publican standard structure.
* Project Widgets allow a maintainer to display the project’s translation statistics on a website as a simple image: perfect for embedding in wiki pages, Trac instances, and email.