Hi folks. We’ve decided to move our translation process for the website to Crowdin. We’ve been using Translatewiki for this, but we think Crowdin is a better fit for our needs. To start contributing, check out https://crowdin.com/project/inaturalistweb. I’ve already uploaded all of our existing Translatewiki translations there. One major caveat is that many languages need to have their plural strings re-translated. Crowdin is more strict about ensuring that languages with multiple plural forms have all of those forms translated before they get exported. Thus, the files I uploaded from Translatewiki that only had some of the forms translated didn’t get included at all. This includes languages like Russian & Czech, so if you’ve provided translations in the past, please check out Crowdin and see if you can translate some of these plural forms.
The long story is that Translatewiki is great for many reasons, but usability is not one of them. Even we on staff find it so hard to use that we basically don’t use it. This means many small problems with markup never get fixed at the source, and we don’t have much communication with the people actually performing translations so we don’t end up explaining context and usage. We suspect these user interface issues also discourage a lot of potential translators (we know it does for some of our iNaturalist Network partners).
Also, some of our iNaturalist Network partners require the kind of proofreader approval process Crowdin supports, and that kind of hierarchy is something Translatewiki seems philosophically opposed to.
If anyone has any questions, please holler. And to re-iterate our policy from the mobile Crowdin project, if anyone wants to be a proofreader for a particular language, please start by adding some translations, and then request proofreader status (it also helps to include your iNat username) by contacting staff members on Crowdin, here in the Forum, or via help@inat.
And to just repeat what I said when I notified Translatewiki, we are extremely grateful for Translatewiki’s contributions over the years. I’m confident their translations contributed greatly to our growth outside of English-speaking countries, so thanks, Translatewiki.
