The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK-based charity that works to put the power of digital making into the hands of people all over the world.
In order to make our content available globally, we need translations of it in various languages. Professional translation on this scale is expensive, and is therefore unsustainable for a small non-profit organisation such as ours. This is why we need your support — as a translation volunteer, you will make it possible for us to reach millions of children all over the world and help them learn essential digital skills. Thank you for helping us out!
If you’re not registered with us as a translation volunteer, please do so by filling in this form before translating any of our projects.
Most of the time, we will be translating our learning resources available on the Raspberry Pi website so we focus on these here. We will occasionally have other translation tasks, such as translation of subtitles for our teacher training videos - you will receive instructions for these if the need arises.
Many of our learning resources focus on teaching programming with Scratch, Python, HTML/CSS and JavaScript. If you’re not familiar with these programming languages, please read the following guidelines which explain what they are and how you should approach them in translation:
Majority of resources consist of the textual and visual instructions displayed on the project’s web page, and an online Trinket/Scratch page that learners use to write and run their code according to the project instructions. Please note that some Trinkets/Scratch pages may be empty while others may already contain some initial code for learners to build on. We need to translate both the project instructions and the initial code. Please carefully read the next two sections (and all the files they link to) to find out how we want you to do it.
To ensure high quality of translations, each project will typically go through three stages (unless we tell you otherwise):
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Translation: a volunteer translator either translates a text from scratch, or edits a text that was pre-translated using machine translation software. We’ll provide you with a checklist of things to bear in mind while you translate, together with some guidelines for dealing with elements such as images or code.
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Review: a volunteer reviewer compares the translation to its English original to make sure that nothing has been mistranslated, omitted, or added. We’ll provide you with a list of things to look out for while reviewing.
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Test: a volunteer tester goes through the translated and reviewed text to try it out and ensure that it can be used for its purpose.
Most of the time, we will let you know which part of the process we want you to contribute to. However, there will be urgent translations that need to be done quickly, in which case we will let you choose your role in the process.
You will be required to use three tools:
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Task Manager: you will use this to let us know you will help; it enables us to keep track of the projects you’re working on and what progress you’re making. Find out how to use the Task Manager.
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Trinket/Scratch: you will use this to translate the initial project code, if a project contains any. It will also be helpful for re-creating some screenshots that need to be translated. Find out how to translate code in Trinket and how to translate code in online Scratch editor.
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Crowdin: you will use it to translate project instructions (which consist of various types of files). Find out how to use Crowdin and how to translate different types of files in Crowdin.
Please note that we are still looking for the best tools for the process so things may change. We will notify you if we replace any of these tools.
If you have any quesions or comments about the process, please contact our Translation Manager (nina@raspberrypi.org).