Translations on GitHub: Walkthrough on the New Utopian Process

Utopian.io has dropped a bomb a few days ago, they no longer support CrowdIn because of the lack of APIs to automate the process. They will now only support translations made via Github. This now a very big challenge for contributors in the translation category. Once the new rules will roll out, a few hours from now, I am very eager to see the first few approved contributions for Translations, if not, then hopefully I will be able to make one.

Source: Team Play

Introduction

As an active contributor at Utopian, especially on the Translations Category, I also can't help seeing a lot of contributions that were duplicated, and copied else where just to have an upvote from Utopian. When it involves money, people can always be very creative to the point that they have disregarded the reason why Utopian.io was created in the first place. People will always go for the easy money, all the time.

Last January 11, Utopian also made quite a few changes with the Translations category. In fact, they have stopped receiving translation works for a few days, because of the mess. When I say mess, it means the spams and the flood of contributions that they have received. As I have mentioned in my previous and first translation update, Translation Category is by far the easiest and most abused category at Utopian. The image below speaks for itself.

Source: Utopian Updates

The previous move to cut off the translation flood were to increase the word count to 1000, and to be very strict with the moderation process, thinking that this will discourage those people who were here just for the easy money. Still there has been a lot of submissions with poor quality, some duplicates, and worse have only used Machine Translators which have really slowed down the moderation process which now takes up to 4-5 days. People have adjusted to the new process, and now send contributions with ease which lead to the updated rules a few days ago.

New Process for Translation Works at Utopian

Rules

Most items on the rules for the translations category remains the same. However, there were quite a few huge updates for this category. Check the image below

• Translations must be provided as a Pull Requst on the GitHub repository.
• The Pull Request must have been merged within the past 14 days.
• Updates on Own Projects can be committed directly, without a Pull Request. Commits must not be older than 14 days.
• Your GitHub username must match that on Utopian. If it does not, you must add your Utopian username in your GitHub profile.

Source: Utopian Rules

What it means for us Contributors?

Only GitHub Translations are Accepted

During my early days here at Utopian, I have submitted contributions outside of CrowdIn and GitHub. I have successfully got 4 translation contributions approved, so far so good. After a while, the category supervisor informed me that they will no longer accept contributions outside of CrowdIn and GitHub, which is not really a problem as CrowdIn is also a great tool to do translation works.

Now, with the new rules we can no longer submit translations via CrowdIn. It must be done within GitHub. You must do it via a Github repository and make a commit, pull-request, and hopefully have your contributions merged to the main repository.

Clone, Commit, Pull-Request, Merge

I hope there's an easy way to say this, but if you don't understand the words on the heading, you may have a hard time with contributing for the Translation Category now. It's not impossible of course, people can always learn to use GitHub. But for non-technical people out there, this might be too complicated or a hassle for you. Even myself and a few developers that I know, it took time for us to appreciate the use of these repositories. And it took time before we get the hang of it.

Source: Still want to go at this?

If this process doesn't discourage you at all, and want to still have a go at this. You can check this guide from Github, it contains a lot of needed information for you to get started.

Translation Process

With the new rules, all translations must be done at GitHub. Which is okay, the killer is that translations must be merged to the actual project repository. Even with CrowdIn before, they still haven't enforced a rule that says that translations must be approved. So this is entirely a new era, and very excited to see how this will go in the next few days.

Testing

In anticipation for the new process, I made a few testing to see if we can really contribute translations via Github. With GitHub, the only possible areas that we can make contributions is through the documentation of GitHub projects. I have already searched a lot of projects, which is a pain, hoping to see a few documents that can be translated.

The only good news about this is that there are quite a lot of open source projects created for documentation purposes alone. Even private companies have created open source projects and communities just to help with the documentation and to encourage everyone to contribute. So I made some testing, translated some documents and made a Pull Request.

The image above, is a screenshot of the translation and the Commit that I made. Basically, the process is very simple. Once you have a copy of the repository, you can now check the files and edit them. Like having a notepad or any code editor, the UI is very difficult to look at though if you were used to CrowdIn's UI.

Just to give an overview, what I did was the following:

1. I forked(meaning I copied) the repository of the github project.
2. From there, I selected the file that I want to translate.
3. Once done with the translation, I commited (saved) my changes.
4. I made a pull request to the main repository. Basically what this does is I wanted to merged my work the to project repository. Which is subject for review and approval.

Now, I am not sure how long this process will take, as I am not really sure if this project have proofreaders who can verify my work. So this may take time. Like for example, I have made some contributions at Mozilla a few months ago, and my contributions were approved and merged after a month. This might be a problem for us contributors. The only thing that made me excited about this was having someone assigned to my PR, that means that someone will be looking at my PR soon, hopefully not too long.

What it means for the Translations Category?

Before, we have seen quite a heavy pour of contributions for this category. But once the new rules are enforced, we can expect a drought. So, I'm very much looking forward to those first approved contributions. Hopefully, the moderators and supervisors for Translations Category have already figured this out, so we can follow suit.

Let's do this!

Source: Get Moving

If not, stay tuned for my next updates. I will create another post once I have some feedback with the latest translations that I made via GitHub.

Series

I will be using this series to make some updates on how the work is done for the Translation Works at Utopian. I have initially made a guide on how to get started with this, but it's now outdated, so I made a new one.

• Newbie's Guide to Translation Works (Now Outdated)

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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