Requirements for website translators

Do you have what it takes to be an official Piwik translator?

• You are a Piwik user — you know the software well — and are passionate about Piwik as an open source project.
• You read English very well and are a native speaker of whichever language you wish to translate piwik.org into.
• You are willing to invest your precious time into translating new content and improving existing pages, as well as reviewing other peoples translations – which can take anywhere from 2 to 10+ hours per week in the first few weeks.
• You want to make a difference by producing great quality work that will make the Piwik.org website accessible to native speakers in your community.
• You want to be part of the Piwik team and have the opportunity to suggest and implement changes in the project.

If you answered yes to all of the above, we would love to hear from you. Please contact us at translations-www@piwik.org and we will let you know how to get started!

Questions to new translators

Thank you for your interest in becoming an official Piwik website translator. As a translator you will be able to make a big difference and improve the quality and accessibility of docs, FAQs and marketing pages in your language. Piwik only relies on word of mouth for marketing so your work will really help non-english speaking users discover the open source analytics alternative Piwik.

New Piwik.org translators are asked the following questions — please let us know your answers:

1. Is the language you wish to translate Piwik.org website into your native language?
2. Are you familiar with HTML? The website pages are written in HTML so it is necessary to understand the HTML structure to be able to work on the translations.
3. Are you currently using Piwik?
4. If yes, what version of Piwik are you using?
   • We recommend you try running Piwik on several websites at once, try to create and use Goals, look at the various settings, use the scheduled reports feature, etc.
     Using Piwik effectively will help producing a great translation of the user documentation and other pages in Piwik.org
5. Do you think the Piwik software translation in your language are of very good quality and easy to understand?
6. Is there any way that the Piwik software translations in your language be improved?

Read the Piwik translation file for your language

To keep the Piwik.org website and the Piwik software consistent, it is important that the website translators reuse the same words and expressions in the documentation and in the Piwik User Interface.

Also, to stay consistent with the industry standard, we recommend to browse through the Google documentation. As you may know, Google is the industry standard when it comes to Web Analytics because GA has 80% analytics marketshare!

1. Please read over the full translation file in your language, in piwik/langs/xy.php so that you know the words and expressions that are currently used in Piwik.
   • This might take 1 hour or more to read through the file.
   • Do you have any question or feedback after reading the translation file?
2. When reading the translation file, you might notice some spelling errors, punctuation errors, or simply text that can be improved.
   Please let us know if this is the case and we will give you access to the Piwik software translation interface so you can first improve the software translation.
   We would really appreciate if the software translation is perfect before working on the website translation!
3. To make sure that the translations used on *.piwik.org will be consistent with the industry standards, please familiarize yourself with the Google Analytics documentation. It is useful to reuse the same terms whenever possible — for example to translate “Goals”, “Ecommerce tracking”, “Visits”, “Page views”, etc. Go to the Google Analytics help section. In the bottom of the page, select your language. Please familiarize yourself with the terms used. We should try and reuse the same terms in the Piwik software translation and website.
   • Do you notice some differences between the terms used in the Piwik software translation and the terms used in Google Analytics?

Once you have improved the software translation (or confirmed that it was already “perfect”), we will proceed to the website translation.

Aiming for high quality translations!

It is critical that translations are of high quality (no grammar or spelling mistake, correct terms, easy to understand text) — so that all visitors to your *.piwik.org website have a good first experience with Piwik:

• Do not translate if you don’t understand perfectly the meaning: ask us!
  If /When you do not understand the English text, please do not translate the bit of text or paragraphs you don’t understand. It is better in this case to leave the text in English in your page. Please ask us for more details and we will explain the meaning, or improve the English text to make it easier to understand.
• Linking to a page in English
  If /When you link to a Piwik.org page not translated in your language (eg. linking to Javascript Tracking page which is not translatable), try and translate the name of the link in your language, even if you haven’t translated the page yet.
  For example the following link <a href=’/docs/manage-websites/’>Manage Websites</a> will be translated in French as <a href=’/docs/manage-websites/’>Gestion des Sites Internet (en anglais)</a>.
  The “(en anglais)” means “(in english)”. You are welcome to leave it out if you plan to translate the linked page in the next few days or weeks.
• Don’t translate literally, translate organically
  Being bi- or multi-lingual, you undoubtedly know that the languages you speak have different structures, rhythms, tones, and inflections. Translated messages don’t need to be structured the same way as the English ones: take the ideas that are presented and come up with a message that expresses the same thing in a natural way for the target language. It’s the difference between creating an equal message and an equivalent message: don’t replicate, replace. Even with more structural items in messages, you have creative license to adapt and change if you feel it will be more logical for, or better adapted to, your target audience.
• Try to keep the same level of formality (or informality)
  Each message has a different level of formality or informality. Exactly what level of formality or informality to use for each message in your target language is something you’ll have to figure out on your own (or with your team), but Piwik text tend to have a politely informal tone in English. Try to accomplish the equivalent in the target language, within your cultural context.
• Don’t use slang or audience-specific terms
  Some amount of terminology is to be expected in the Piwik doc pages, but refrain from using colloquialisms that only the “in” crowd will get. If the uninitiated webmaster were to visit *.piwik.org in your language, would they know what the term means?