Translations

Welcome to Translations for CoronaTracker!

Team Lead: Sal Volpe (@laseplov)

We want to make sure that everyone, regardless of their experience with English, can be well-informed and maintain best-practices during this time! And that can only be made possible with YOUR help!

Get Involved

• Read our general Corona-Tracker README to learn more about the project
• Join our Discord!
• JSON Formatted Translation Files

Instructions

1. Go to the CoronaTracker Translation Efforts Spreadsheet
2. Mark down your Name and Discord Handle next to the respective language(s) for which you can translate.
   • Greatest preference is to work on languages for which you are native and/or fluent. Please do not work on a language unless you feel that this status of language proficiency describes you. It is important for us to maintain accuracy.
3. If you click on the name of the language, it will link you to a translation sheet in the Master Sheets Google Drive folder.
   • Translations that need to be made will be marked in yellow (though this is buggy, so use your discretion and skim over everything just to make sure).
   • Once you finish translating the text for either of your translation columns (e.g., question, answer, flashcard, etc.), the time will update and mark it as complete
   • To be updated when new text is ready for translation, on your spreadsheet click Tools –> Notification Rules and select Any changes are made and Email - daily digest
4. Be sure to document your progress described by the provided colors in the Legend on the Efforts spreadsheet as this is the best way to inform the team of your overall progress.
   • Once you believe that the text you have made is ready to be reviewed by Sal or anyone else working on that language, mark it in blue and alert the #translations channel in Discord.
   • After discussing with Sal or others, you can then mark it in green and preface your message in the Discord channel with @laseplov and @Back-end so that we all know the text is ready for to be implemented.
5. Ask me any questions that you have!
   • Contact Sal! Discord: @laseplov ; Email: volpesal@gmail.com
   • Message the #translations channel in Discord

Current Timeline

• 4/17 – Beta Launched
• 4/28 – Revised pipeline
• 5/18 - Beta ends!
• 6/1 – Fill in all missing information ASAP
• 6/1 - Working toward ROADMAP-TO-MVP goals

FAQ (from Sal)

Q: May I work on more than one language?

A: Of course! But please abide by our guidelines of who should translate what.

Q: May I use Google Translate?

A: I personally find Google Translate to be a rather frustrating resource because it does not grasp the grammatical and syntactic aspect of long series of text. It may be the case that you may be seeing a lot of vocabulary used for this app with which you are unfamiliar because of how you learned your non-English language, and looking up terms or spot checking a translator in this context is more than fine.

Instead of Google Translate I recommend using:

• DeepL – if you are translating sentence fragments or lists
• Linguee – citation based translation dictionary. It is the textual counterpart to DeepL that allows you to see the exact sources from which the AI pulled to see if the context from which the recommended terms are pulled
• WordReference – Generally has more possible options for each term that you are looking for as well as forums where people have longer Q&As along with their country of origin and proficiency with the language of interest.

Q: What if I want to translate into a language that isn’t on the efforts spreadsheet?

A: Mention it in the #translations channel on Discord and I will make a copy of the spreadsheet and Google Doc for that language!

Q: If I see something that I believe is incorrectly translated, what do I do?

A: Send a message to the people whose Discord handles are provided! No one person should have the final say of what is right and wrong because we’re a team. You may not know why they used a particular word or phrase, or it may have been a situation where they genuinely didn’t read it properly and made a typo or used the wrong word. Mistakes happen! But for the sake of valuing each other’s work, I ask that you have discussions around any discrepancies that you notice.

Q: If I see a question/answer that is not appropriate within the cultural framework of my language(s), what, what should I do?

A: Let us know! These surveys and questions are in no way perfect and we want to be adjusting them. We understand that despite what may be of interest to us, language and cultural barriers supersede that. We will have discussions with Education, Medical, and Analytics to best account for barriers or regional dialects.

Also, we’re keeping the beta US-oriented, so leave non-US translations as a note on the respective answer cell (and we will work on reformatting later).

Q: So...I finished everything. Now what?

A: Speak up! There’s always more to do or something someone may need help with!