W3C Translations
Introduction | How to Volunteer | Unofficial and Authorized Translations | What to translate | 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 specification and other documents, alone or together with somebody else.
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 endeavour 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.
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.
What to translate
W3C publishes various types of documents, including drafts in the Recommendation tracks (working drafts, candidate recommendations, etc.), W3C Notes, courses, activity home pages, presentations, etc. We strongly encourage translators to concentrate on specific documents only, namely:
- W3C Recommendations: these are stable documents, their translations will have the greatest impact.
- Group Notes: these represent Working Group (or Interest Group) output and may be useful as support material for a Recommendation.
- W3C Outreach materials: these documents may be very useful but please note that they do not necessarily represent the consensus of W3C and may be unstable. You should contact the author(s) before translating to confirm the stability of the document.
Some W3C groups may suggest additional documents to translate:
- WAI has published a prioritized list of accessibility documents to translate,
- the 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.
Working Drafts, Candidate Recommendations, Proposed Recommendations, and other W3C Web pages may change by the time the translation is published, thereby obsoleting the translation. This may also give wrong information to experts in a specific language community. They may not be aware of the details of the W3C Process and may be misled to believe that the translation referred to via these pages is the translation of a stable document. For these reasons, such translations are not added to the database that is referred to in these pages.
It is, however, recognized that in some cases translations of Recommendation Track drafts might be useful for the development process, for reviewing, etc. If you want to contribute to those, please contact the relevant working group; a reference to your translation may be added to the working group's document list.
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 1492 translations in 54 languages. This includes 446 translations of W3C Recommendations, and 1046 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).
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Last modified: $Date: 2010/07/20 10:32:49 $
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