If you’ve ever wondered how Fedora is translated into your preferred language? The answer is the Fedora L10N team. Translation is done across over 100 individual projects in over 90 languages. Developers of each project upload new strings to the L10n translation platform and teams of translators work together translate and review as many strings as possible before each new Fedora release.

Ever wanted to get involved in the Fedora project but wasn’t sure how?

Joining the L10n team may be for you. If you would like to get involved, the team have put together a guide to get you started.

A New Translation Platform

Until recently, Fedora L10n had been benefiting from a localization platform, Transifex. But after Transifex announced it would be moving to a propriety code base, major concern arose. A core value of Fedora is Freedom, moving to an alternative FLOSS translation platform was supported by the L10n team. A few alternative were available, but the Zanata team quickly provided instances for the team to test. After a month of testing, the team voted in favour of switching to Zanata. This decision was brought to FESCO and also gained the Fedora developers agreement.

Moving to a new platform did mean some L10n members were lost, but this was expected and many were considered to be inactive before the move anyway. Over 390 members are now working on Zanata, many of which have quickly adapted.

Feedback

It’s been over 6 months since the migration to Zanata and if you have been involved in any part of the process, we’d love your feedback. To assist with this, we have put together a quick survey.

We plan to post the anonymized results to the Zanata blog, Fedora L10n mailing list, and in the comments of this post.

We hope to use the results to better understand the Fedora community’s translation needs and goals, and ensure Zanata is the best tool to fulfil them.

We’d love your feedback.