W3C Translations
Introduction | What to translate | How to Volunteer | Translation Quality | Unofficial and Authorized Translations | Discussion fora | Glossaries | Internationalization | Further Information About this Site
See also the advanced search for translations or the sidebar for further links.
Introduction
The working language of the W3C is US English. The official version of a W3C document is the US English language version at the W3C site. The W3C tries to reach as many people and organizations around the world as possible. But translating specifications is a lot of work, and we need your help. We made it easy to help us with translations, and invite you to volunteer to translate some W3C specifications, alone or together with somebody else.
What to translate
W3C encourages translations of W3C Recommendations; these are stable documents, their translations will have the greatest impact. Since September 2012, only translations of W3C Recommendations and Authorized Translations will be added to the Translations Database.
Some W3C groups may suggest additional documents to translate:
- WAI has published a prioritized list of accessibility documents to translate,
- the former QA activity has labelled by "[translation welcomed]" these documents in their document library,
- the Internationalization Activity welcomes translations of its articles and tutorials when sanctioned by the Activity Lead.
- there is a separate guideline page for the translation of CSS related pages
How to Volunteer
First, search. Existing translations can be found by using the search facilities on this page. In order to avoid duplications, you must check whether the document you intend to translate has alreay been translated. Additionally, please, check the w3c-translators@w3.org mailing list archives for existing intention to translate that document. If you know about a translation that is not listed here, please write to w3c-translators@w3.org.
If the URI of the document you plan to translate starts with
http://www.w3.org/International/ the process varies a little from the
other W3C volunteer translations, and you should follow
these instructions.
Before you start a translation, please make sure you have read the information on translations in our W3C Intellectual Property FAQ. Your translation(s) will need to bear a prominent disclaimer in which you disclose, (1) the title of and link to the original English document, (2) that your document is a translation which may contain errors, and (3) that the original English document on the W3C website is the one that is official. (Items (2) and (3) must be in the target language.)
Second, announce your intention. After you've performed the above-mentioned search, and before you start translating, please, send a notification by e-mail to the w3c-translators@w3.org mailing-list, and let us know the title(s) and URI(s) of the document(s). You're encouraged to use the template e-mail [Intention of translation].
We expect you to make sure the links within your translation(s) are valid and to endeavor to provide valid markup and CSS (validation tools are at http://validator.w3.org/).
Third, announce your translation(s). When you've completed your translation(s), please, send a notification by e-mail to the w3c-translators@w3.org mailing-list, and let us know the English and target language title(s) and URI(s) of the document(s). You're encouraged to use the template e-mail [Completed translation].
Translation Quality
Raw machine translation does not provide an acceptable level of quality for W3C translations. In general, if we receive feedback from the w3c translation community to indicate that your translation is of poor quality we may remove the link to your translation from the database. The link will be reinstated if you later bring the quality of the translation to a quality level that is acceptable to the community. W3C instructs search engines to ignore links from the Translations pages. Because of several problems with translation quality and that there appears to be a correlation with people who are primarily interested in SEO rankings, we feel it is important to retain the nofollow attribute.
Unofficial and Authorized Translations
Translations are usually prepared to help the communities around the World understanding the W3C technologies and, as such, most of them have an informative, unofficial character. However, in some cases, the translations are meant to be used for official purposes, too, such as referencing in local and regional standards, or as part of organizational policies or regulatory processes. To develop such translations, W3C has also defined a process for Authorized W3C Translations which ensures transparency and community accountability in the development of authorized translations under the oversight of W3C. Please, consult the the relevant document for the details of that process.
Discussion fora
For notifying us about starting or completing a translation (required), we have created the publicly archived w3c-translators@w3.org mailing list. This list can also be used to discuss questions you have when translating. To subscribe to this list, please send an email to w3c-translators-request@w3.org with the word "subscribe" in the subject line (include the word "unsubscribe" if you want to unsubscribe). You can also browse through the archives of that list, or search it using this form:
There are also some language specific mailing lists and discussion fora for translations in French, Hungarian (a wiki page for Hungarian translators is also available), and in Simplified Chinese.
Glossaries
General, W3C related glossaries are available in Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, German, and Korean. The Glossary of Terms for Device Independence has also been translated to French, Italian, Polish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Spanish.
Internationalization
Related to translations is the Internationalization Activity. Its task is to make the content of the W3C specifications useful not only for English-speaking or Latin-writing part of the world, but truly worldwide. Please, consult the home page of that activity if you want to join.
Further Information About this Site
Currently, this page refers to 1847 translations in 56 languages. This includes 514 translations of W3C Recommendations, and 1333 translations of other documents, such as tutorials, notes, member or team submissions, guidelines, etc.
If you are curious about how translations are managed at W3C and how you can access this information, you can consult our separate page on translation management. This may be particulary interesting if you wish to maintain your own list of translation references either on a particular technology or language.
Announcements of new translations added to this site can also be syndicated using RSS 1.0 (an RDF vocabulary used for site summaries) and are also available in the archives.
Ivan Herman. Please send comments on this page to the W3C Communication team (w3t-comm@w3.org).
The queries rely on the following RDF files: tr.rdf, Trans2005.rdf, Trans2006.rdf, Trans2007.rdf, Trans2008.rdf, Trans2009.rdf, Trans2010.rdf, Trans2011.rdf, Trans2012.rdf, Trans2013.rdf, TransTo2004.rdf, extras.rdf, langInfo.rdf, translators.rdf, docGroups.rdf, recs.rdf, commented.rdf, deadDucks.rdf, and extraControls.rdf.
Last modified: $Date: 2013-01-15 10:04:08 $
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