About translating open source projects

in opensource •  8 years ago  (edited)

I have been using open source software since 1999. In the beginning I paid a small monthly subscription to Mandrake Linux, but the longer I used all this free as in beer goodness I wanted to pay something back, so I tried to see if I could translate some of the programs into my mother tongue, Danish. The first projects I tried to translate was KDE and later Drupal - I did my best but the software was extremely cumbersome and bureaucratic. In the long run it was to much bother and I went back to just donating to my favourite applications, especially KDE that I have used since the beginning and still am using.


KDE my windows manager of choice has this kawaii dragon called Konqi as a mascot. The image is from Filipe Saraiva's blog. I choose it because the lady next to Konqi looked so sweet.

But four-five years ago I quit Facebook and made an account on Diaspora part of the federated network containing Friendica, hubzilla, and sister-application to Gnusocial/Mastodon. Here (again) the urge to be a do-good-er came over me and to my pleasant surprise I found that the translation-tools have improved immensely since the early 2000!

I have just begun translating the open-source alternative to Patreon called Liberapay (Mainly because I recently made an account), and I am also doing very slow progress in E-steem. They all use different systems, and I must say that I prefer the one used by the Diaspora developers called webtranslateit.com - but the other two are actually rather good too.


Authors get paid when people like you upvote their post.
If you enjoyed what you read here, create your account today and start earning FREE STEEM!