How to localize?

Back to around May, the Rust team made all strings in the Rust website being localizable so that the communities from all over the world can localize the Rust website to different languages.

Now you can see all locale files in the repo www.rust-lang.org/locales on Github and all translations are in the .ftl format-type files, and these .ftl files are synchronized to Pontoon.

Rust team uses Pontoon, which is developed by Mozilla and also used in its products for localization, to empower translators to translate the strings easily.

404.ftl in Pontoon

The photo above is the dashboard of Pontoon. In a particular .ftl file, all strings are listed in the left and shown in English, there is an input block to enter the translation sentence at the upper right part, and there are history sentences at the lower right part.

It always takes two people to finish each translation of a string, including a “suggestor” who promotes a translation and an approver who agrees with a new or modified string. Note that the condition of suggestions and approvements within the same person is forbidden.

The gathering of Rust Taiwan community

I first saw the twitter by Manish and started to think about leading the Rust Taiwan community to deal with this, but I was busy at that moment.

At the same time, the community in China had been working on this issue. They formed up a group and started to translate the website. Alex, who is one of the contributors, had recorded the process of the translation for Simplified Chinese in the post below (in Chinese).

Several weeks later, I became the organizer of the localization of traditional Chinese, leading the Rust Taiwan Community to engage in this work. Since Alex and the simplified Chinese working group already has experience about the localization task, I asked Alex for help and suggestion. Later, I connected to Florian Gilcher, and he helped me to create the ZH-TW team in Pontoon, which requires a member in Rust team to doing that.

If any communities want to localize their own version of the Rust website, all they need is just a team on Pontoon. It takes at least three people to assemble a working team, and the manager who is assigned in the Pontoon has the permission to assign people as either contributors, who can just give suggestions, or translators, who can approve the suggestions, as well as to add a new manager.

We the Rust Taiwan team translated the website at 6/29 (Sat.) on the regular meetup per month. Armed with the efforts of all people in the community, we finished the task after about 3 hours fighting.

Once the localization is done, there is a staging website for testing: https://www-staging.rust-lang.org/zh-TW/. We invited more people from other communities, such as the Mozilla community in Taiwan, to help review the correctness and give suggestions. After many times of revisions, the ZH-TW version has finally released in threes days just after we published the first staging version.

Cheers! A thousand of champagne bottles uncorked at the same time.