The WebTranslateIt Blog

Today we’d like to bring into focus the EuroLargeCarnivores project which aims at improving our coexistence with large carnivores in Europe through communication, exchange of knowledge and cross-border cooperation.

WTI: What is the EuroLargeCarnivores project exactly?
R.H.: EuroLargeCarnivores (ELC) is a project funded by the EU LIFE Programme. It aims at showing the impact of many projects on wolf, bear, lynx and wolverine that were implemented over the past decades.
As diverse as the landscapes are that large carnivores return to, as divergent are the reactions of local communities living there. A return evokes emotions ranging from fear to elation. Conflicts arise especially with stakeholders in traditional agriculture such as sheep herding, for whom it is vital to find practical solutions for coexistence.
The ELC project aims at providing a platform to gather and share knowledge on human-large carnivore coexistence among various stakeholders across the European Union, Switzerland and Ukraine. Topics like monitoring, human-wildlife conflict mitigation and prevention, the discussion of fears and safety concerns, herding practices, but also poaching, economic opportunities and investment requirements are the focus of this LIFE project.

The ELC project also provides visibility for scientific publications regarding large carnivores. We are currently testing certain conflict mitigation approaches in 10 testing sites across Europe and there is for instance a comprehensive discussion among scientists on which instruments work for protecting your livestock from being attacked by wolf - hence, we don’t expect that one size will fit all. We do however want to provide people with context relevant information that can actually help them understand what works for their situation - and at the same time inform the European Commission about the conclusion we gather over the project duration.

WTI: Who are the people who started the ELC project and what was their main motivation?
R.H.: It has mainly been launched by a network of WWF country offices, and coordinated by WWF Germany (who is also my employer), but also includes non-WWF partners. We are also looking for cooperation in countries and regions we are currently not active in.

WTI: How is the website for the ELC project maintained and developed? Do you rely only on volunteers?
R.H.: In the countries and focus regions that the project is working in, the work is done by our project partners - however, in other regions any suited body (e.g. national administrations) are welcome to contribute.

WTI: What is the aim of the website? Is it solely informative or is it a more interactive platform?
R.H.: The website mainly provides visibility for people that we work with, as well as at a later stage context sensitive information such as: If my livestock is attacked, whom should I reach out to in my country? We try to provide space for discussion, so that everyone can provide their perspective (and not only successful project managers) - however, we have some doubt that the people that live in remote areas actually use the Internet as much. Another main function of this website is to keep track of what we learn and make it directly accessible to the European Commission.

WTI: In how many languages do you intend to translate the website and how could people help out with the translation?
R.H.: We’re currently covering 14 of the European languages: Croatian; English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish plus Ukrainian - and we’d still need help for Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian,  Greek,  Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Maltese.

WTI: Can you tell us how WebTranslateIt is helping you along the way?
R.H.: With a five year timeframe our budget for external assistance is limited, and we rather want to use this for on site activities, rather than for overhead, so WTI really came in handy. Also, the website content keeps evolving and WTI helps us to easily manage our team of volunteer translators and guarantee continuous translation.
The CMS (Pimcore) we use is directly pulling the translations from Webtranslateit - hence we now have the flexibility to finalise translations with different timelines for every partner, as it resonates with their time budget. Also it would be great if volunteers could help us out for the languages we do only have automatic translations for at the moment.

WTI: How do you finance the project?
R.H.: The project is largely funded by the EU LIFE Programme with the reference LIFE16 GIE/DE/000661. LIFE is the EU’s financial instrument supporting environmental and nature conservation projects throughout the EU.

WTI: Are you looking for volunteers in there any other fields related to the project (developing, content writing, editing, field workers…)?
R.H.: We are on the search for normal people’s experience with large carnivores, challenges and practical solutions - please share them with us via the take action function on our website, or by email.

Are you a translator and interested in helping out the EuroLargeCarnivores project reach out to as many people as possible? Get involved


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WebTranslateIt has started sponsoring Málaga Bike, a Málaga cycling team, a little bit more than a year ago and we are really proud to say that they have been doing really good this Summer in the Andalusian championships.

The team’s champions, Bruno Cuesta, Kini Muñoz Villodres and Victor Cardenas have been seen on the winner’s podium more than once and are breaking records!
Our dear Victor has been injured so couldn’t participate to all of the races and we wish him a prompt recovery.

One of the most sought after prices in Spanish competitions: the ham! At least that one is not gonna get all dusty on the mantel of your fireplace.

Congratulations to all of them, shall they keep up the good work!

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We just released an improvement to our i18next support. If you don’t know it, i18next is a Javascript library to help internationalizing apps written in JavaScript.

Its file formats have changed quite a bit since its inception, with 3 versions which differ quite a bit for languages with complex plural forms. Up to today WebTranslateIt supported only the first version of the language files. We now support all of them.

Now, projects set up before the 10th of September 2018 will keep using i18next v1 by default. Projects set up after September 2018 are using i18next v3 by default. You can change the version of i18next you are using in the File Manager.

Click on “Rename/Details” to see the details of your language file.

And select which version of the i18next you’d like to use.

I hope you will find this improvement useful. Thank you for using WebTranslateIt and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Every now and then, we like to talk about the great projects that are being supported by WebTranslateIt. Gibberfish is one of them.

Gibberfish, Inc. was founded by Simon Spartalian, Raymond Lalumiere, Brian O'Donnell and Rob Rickner. All of them wished to support non-profit organizations, activists and human rights defenders worldwide by providing them with accessible encryption.

WTI: What exactly is Gibberfish?
B.O.D.: We are an all-volunteer non-profit that provides a secure, private cloud collaboration platform. For qualifying groups we provide zero-knowledge hosting free of charge. Our software is 100% free and open source, so anyone who wishes can also download and run it themselves. In either case, the cost is always $0.

WTI: Who are the people who started it and what was your main motivation?
B.O.D.: Our founders are a group of friends with a diverse set of skills. We are united by our belief that privacy is central to protecting free speech, individual liberties and civil rights.

The initial impetus for our project came from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in Standing Rock, South Dakota in 2016. A lot of groups that participated in those protests communicated using platforms like Google Docs or Facebook. These platforms have a notoriously bad track record when it comes to privacy. There is ample evidence of peaceful protesters being attacked and harassed by authorities tracking them via their cell phones and Facebook posts. This surveillance was magnified by private companies who make it their business to know—and sell—our personal information. In this environment it became clear to us that activists need online tools that can’t be weaponized against them.

We took a look at what already existed, and it fell into one of three broad categories:
- ‘Free’ but questionably private (Facebook, Google, et al)
- Paid, with robust privacy protections (e.g. SpiderOak)
- Do-it-yourself solutions (ownCloud, Nextcloud, etc)

For small groups with limited funds the ‘free’ option is often the only choice, and it’s arguably the worst one. Unfortunately, a group on a shoestring budget can’t afford the fees charged by paid services. Both ‘free’ and paid services can also respond to requests or demands for your information without your knowledge or consent. DIY solutions have many great advantages. Most importantly they return complete control over your data to the user. But while they can be reasonably affordable, they require a high level of technical skill.

We decided that we could take an existing DIY alternative, namely Nextcloud, and remove all of the technical and financial hurdles to provide something with the same quality and usability of the major online platforms while making privacy and security paramount.

WTI: How is Gibberfish maintained and developed? Do you rely only on volunteers?
B.O.D.: Gibberfish is composed of two main software projects, both of which are open-source under the MIT License. The first, Pancrypticon, is an automation of the Nextcloud stack using Docker. Each service runs in its own container and they are all tightly integrated to work together seamlessly. We can upgrade, modify, or replace any component easily. From the user’s perspective, their cloud just works.

Our second project, Daygate, is a web application written in Django. Daygate serves as the management portal we provide to our hosted clients. It allows them to deploy their cloud server with a single click, and intuitively self-manage SSH keys and backups.

Both projects are public on Gitlab.com and we gladly accept and encourage community contributions. We continue to expand system availability and enhance user experience.

WTI: Can you tell us how WebTranslateIt is helping you along the way?
B.O.D.: Accessibility is really important to us. We want our project to be accessible and approachable to everyone, worldwide. Since we’ve already removed technical and financial barriers from our service, it’s natural to eliminate language barriers as well. We’re all primary English speakers, so having translators is invaluable.

We put out a call for volunteers and got a great response, but it quickly became difficult to manage a dozen or so translators by swapping files over email. When we found out about WebTranslateIt (via a post on Diaspora*) we were excited. Now it’s very easy to direct volunteers to our project, see their progress, and let them know when we need corrections or updates. In the past we manually transcribed translator’s work into our codebase. Now we can pull in changes automatically using a simple script.

We need to make every dollar count, so the free service for non-profits enables us to succeed.

WTI: Gibberfish is already available in 13 languages, do you have more coming and how could people help out with the translation?
B.O.D.: Our initial focus in recruitment was to cover the most commonly used languages online first. We were able to have the top ten languages fully translated, although we still need help keeping our information up to date.

Anyone who is interested in helping us translate our materials from English to another language can request an invitation to one of our WebTranslateIt projects directly:
- the translation project of our Management Portal
- or that of our User Documentation.

WTI: How do you finance the project?
B.O.D.: Our organization is volunteer driven, and we rely on donations to fund our activities. All of the members of the team work for free, and we use free open-source software. There are still significant costs associated with hosting servers for our clients, as well as overhead from registration fees, and other online services. In our first year we all invested our own money in the project. Now that we’re fully operational and taking on real costs, it’s more important than ever to get public support.

We’re a registered, tax-exempt 501©(3) organization, so all contributions by US taxpayers are fully deductible. Regardless, 100% of your donation will go to directly support privacy and liberty worldwide.

If you wish to help out, don’t hesitate to donate.

WTI: How many users do you have and what kind of feedback do you get from them?
B.O.D.: We’re somewhat fanatical about our clients’ privacy, so we don’t say much about them individually or as a class. By design, Gibberfish severely limits what is even possible to know about a user. We can say that they have been grateful to have our service available in languages they understand.
If Webtranslateit users know a group that could benefit from Gibberfish we would love to hear from them. For everyone’s safety and security, please do not send us names or contact information for anyone. We cannot reach out. Interested groups must contact us through an encrypted channel. One is available on our website.

WTI: Do you intend on creating a version that could be commercialised and sold for instance to companies relying a lot on R&D to help you keep supplying the tool for free to non-profit organizations?
B.O.D.: We started this with the goal of providing a free service to people in need, and we have no plans to do otherwise.

WTI: Are there any features your team is working on right now and for which you need help in priority?
B.O.D.: Development of our Management Portal has priority right now. Currently it allows our clients to self-deploy their apps, manage backups and upload SSH keys. We would like to further improve these features, as well as add new ones with the goal of giving as much autonomy and control as possible to the client. Volunteers who have experience with Django, python in general, and Javascript would all be very valuable. Additionally, we have some tweaks and features we would like to see in Nextcloud, so we could also use the help of PHP programmers who could develop these features for us and submit them to the upstream Nextcloud codebase.

However we don’t just need programmers! People who can help us share the responsibility of website maintenance, blogging, social media presence, fundraising, etc are all welcome, and we encourage them to contact us. We’re a small group that wears a lot of hats, so there’s plently of work to go around for volunteers with nearly any skillset.


Do you wish to get involved?
Contact the Gibberfish team via email at info@gibberfish.org or via their encrypted contact form.

Are you a developer and want to help out? Go directly to Gibberfish’s Gitlab page.
If you wish to help out financially, don’t hesitate to donate.


Are you a non-profit organization in need of translating a project on a budget? Don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll help out.


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Hi folks,

On May 25, new data privacy laws called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) take effect in the European Union. These laws provide consumers with more control over their personal data.

We agree with the idea of the GDPR for a safe and secure Internet. In fact, ever since the beginning of WebTranslateIt in 2009 we’ve always been collecting the least information possible about our users.
Regarding the personal data we do collect, we are committed to your right to privacy and to being transparent about how and why we store your data.

Here are the specifics of what we’ve done to comply with GDPR.

Privacy Policy

We’ve added a new Privacy Policy page. This page clarifies the types of information we collect, why we collect it, and how long data is stored.

Basically, we only collect your e-mail address and password, and if you choose to do so, an image and your name. The only caveat is that your name and image will be displayed on the people’s page of the projects you contribute to for other team members to see. Also your e-mail address will be visible to project managers on that page (so that they can contact you).

If you are a customer, we also collect your organization address, billing e-mail address, payment details, bank country, VAT number or Tax Identification number as we are legally required to do so.

Cookies

We added a cookie notice to all marketing pages. We do not use any analytics software and only use cookies for technical reasons.

Deletion

We have always allowed users to delete their user accounts by themselves. As usual, you can do this in your settings. When a user deletes their user account, all the work they contributed to (comments, translations) are anonymized (eg. “a deleted user translated this segment”).

Modification

Users can change their information stored on WebTranslateIt in their settings at any time.

Access and Portability

A user can request access to a copy of the personal data that we have collected. Users who wish to request portability can reach out to us at any time. As we work with language files, the easiest way for you is just to download your language files to import it to another tool compatible with your language files.

Updates to the website regarding privacy

We were previously running analytics on the blog and marketing pages and we are no longer doing that.

We were using Twitter and Facebook buttons on some pages of the website, and we replaced them with static buttons generated with the awesome SharingButtons.io.

List of sub-processors

As WebTranslateIt is a data processor, we are required to maintain a list of our sub-processors.

Data Protection Addendum

We’ve created a legal agreement that business users can request, promising the protection of all personally identifiable information and sensitive information that we collect and store. You can download this document here.

For more information about our privacy policies, please head over to our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Security Policy pages.

Thank you so much for reading. Should you have any questions about our GDPR compliance, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.