New in Web Translate It: Public projects for crowd-sourcing!

I just rolled out a new version of Web Translate It. Projects can now be open to the public. This is useful for crowd-sourcing!

Reworked project homepage

If you visit your project pages, you will notice it has been reworked quite a bit.

The activity feed has been moved to a dedicated tab, and the project home page now feature a list of the latest comments made on the project.

New settings

There are also a few new options in the project settings.

You can now put a description for your project and a link to your project homepage. The description is formatted using Markdown, so you’re not bound to write a description here: you can use this field to give general instructions to the translation team, or anything else you think can be useful.

Private and public projects — Crowdsourcing

And this… Well this is a bigger thing. You can now make your project public and browsable by everyone. By default, new and existing projects are set to private, and to be able to translate or comment on your project, users will have to request an invitation.

It seems to be a little change (it was definitely not!), but it is actually the first step to use Web Translate It to crowd-source your project’s translations. It is only the first step, and that was a tough one.

It is also great for Open-Source projects to improve their visibility.

How does it work?

This is your project page you can see if you’re a project member.

If you make the project public, this is what everyone else will see. You can actually see it by yourself here.

In order to join the translation team, the user will have to request an invitation to the project manager. The user can do so by clicking on the invitation link.

You can directly your users to the invitation request page and provide their e-mail address in the URL, too. For instance: https://webtranslateit.com/projects/244-VLC-unofficial-/invitation_request?email=john.doe@webtranslateit.com

When the project manager will have accepted the invitation, the user will be able to translate the project.

This is really the simplest solution that could possibly work for this issue. This workflow will work fine for projects until you reach 3 translators per language. If your user base is very much larger than this and hundreds of users want to join the translation team (lucky you!), you will need a more advanced system to handle vandalisms, translation suggestions, and so on. I will progressively improve this feature in time with a voting system.

I hope you will find this new feature useful. Thank you for using Web Translate It.