For a very long time, our community has done a fantastic job of translating the text on almalinux.org. I want to pause both to thank the people who have been contributing already, and to highlight where we might need some assistance. And also to show you how easy it is!
How website translations work
Everything from the navigation, buttons, page sections, and other shared site text (nearly everything except blog posts) lives in translation files in the website GitHub repository. We accept translations of those strings with Weblate, an open source, web-based translation platform. You don’t need to know Git, Hugo, or any code at all to contribute. You sign in to Weblate, pick your language, and translate strings one at a time from your browser.
At regular intervals, Weblate bundles saved translations into a pull request on the website repository. A member of the Promo SIG (Special Interest Group) reviews it, looking for anything that seems woefully out of place or incorrect, and then merges it. Once merged, your translation is deployed and used on the site! That review process usually takes a day or two (depending mostly on who has time to review the pull request).
A few things to keep in mind before you start:
- Please only translate into a language you speak natively. While machine translation has come a long way in helping us understand each other, nearly all cases of machine translation read poorly to native speakers.
- If you see a translation in your language that could be better, please suggest an improvement! Improving and polishing existing work is just as valuable as filling in new strings.
- If your native language isn’t listed and you would like to help contribute that translation, you can request it from the project page in Weblate, or open an issue on GitHub.
Contributing translations
Our wiki has a step-by-step guide to translating the site, with screenshots, if you’d like a walkthrough. Getting started just takes a couple steps!
Where we are today
The site has 1,121 strings to translate, and translators are working in more than 30 languages. These numbers are shifting all the time as text is added or changed on the website, but here’s how they stand as of October 28th.
Complete, or nearly there
Five languages are at 98% or higher:
- Indonesian (99%)
- Kazakh (98%)
- Russian (99%)
- Swedish (100%)
- Ukrainian (100%)
Simplified Chinese is right behind them at 97%. Russian and Simplified Chinese both made big jumps in just the past week. Indonesian, Kazakh, and Tamil were only added this summer, and Indonesian and Kazakh are already nearly complete.
Halfway or more
Nearly all of these languages have had nearly complete translations in the past, but as content is updated we need folks to come back and fill it in again.
- Spanish (78%)
- Tamil (65%)
- Portuguese (52%)
- French (50%)
Languages that need help
These languages have a lot of AlmaLinux users and are close to the halfway mark, so a few dedicated translators could make a real difference:
- German (49%)
- Japanese (49%)
- Brazilian Portuguese (47%)
- Italian (39%)
- Arabic (37%)
These languages are further from done, and every string you translate shows up right away:
- Finnish (33%), Hebrew (32%), Czech (25%), Polish (24%), and Turkish (20%)
- Slovak (19%), Hungarian (14%), Korean (13%), and Catalan (13%)
- Persian (8%), Serbian (8%), Greek (5%), Latvian (4%), and Lithuanian (3%)
- Danish, Estonian, and Esperanto, which haven’t been started yet
We also just added Swahili (Kiswahili), after community members asked for it. It’s ready for its first translators now!
If you speak any of these languages natively, your help would mean a lot to the people who read our site in them.
Thank you to our translators
Some of our translators have been at this for years. I want to thank them by name, because the site wouldn’t read the way it does in their languages without them.
- bittin has translated Swedish since 2023 and has done more translation work on our site than anyone else.
- eulalio has translated Spanish since 2023 and is still one of our most active translators.
- Hotripak has translated Ukrainian since 2024 and helped take it to 100%.
- Kyotaro Iijima has been translating Japanese since 2021.
- Adolfo Jayme Barrientos has contributed to Spanish since 2021.
- Rodrigo de Avila has translated Brazilian Portuguese since 2023.
I also want to thank translators who did a huge amount of work in earlier years, including gallegonovato (Spanish), Yaron Shahrabani and Noam Alum (Hebrew), Takuya Wakazono and Souta Kawahara (Japanese), and Максим Горпиніч (Ukrainian).
And a big thank you to the people who’ve pushed languages forward recently:
- Andrei Stepanov took Russian to 99% this week.
- Ziki Shay, along with xiezhihai, eNoWater, Lezhe Gao, and Ziqi Shen, took Simplified Chinese past 90%.
- Arif Budiman translated Indonesian to 99%.
- Baurzhan Muftakhidinov translated Kazakh to 98%.
- Opam has been moving Italian forward.
- Enrique Sanchez, Javi Hernandez, Francisco Serrador, and Guillermo Patterer (Spanish), armada bzh, Adrien D, and Titouan Mandeville (French), Gustavo Kreischer de Almeida, Guilherme Wilson, and Jonathan M (Brazilian Portuguese), Ettore Atalan, Kurt Schumacher, Max Kleinehelleforth, and leinaduhcs (German), Daniel Nylander (Swedish), Wiesław Fijołek (Polish), Şükrü Eren Gökırmak (Turkish), vale-decem (Serbian), Mp Mp (Persian), and தமிழ்நேரம் (Tamil) all contributed this year.
Also, a big, huge thank you to the Weblate team for hosting our project, and to the Promo SIG members who review every translation pull request.
If you translated for us and I missed you, please tell me in the Promo SIG channel and I’ll add you! You deserve the recognition for sure.
Come translate with us
If you speak a language other than English, I’d love your help. Create a Weblate account, open the AlmaLinux project, pick your language, and start translating. Even ten strings makes a difference. If you have questions, come say hi in the Promo SIG channel on our chat server or email us at promo-sig@almalinux.org. There are no silly questions, and we’re happy to help you get started.
