Tor Website Translation Guidelines

If you want to help translate the Tor website and documentation into other languages, here are some guidelines to help you do this as efficiently as possible.

If you would like to help translate other Tor project related information, please visit our Translation Overview for a clear overview of what needs translation help. If you're stuck, please contact us via email: tor-translation AT torproject.org.

To get an idea how current our translations are, we have created a page with the current translation status.

Note that even if you can't translate many pages for your language, a few pages will still be helpful. Also, rather than just translating each page word by word, please try to translate the ideas so they make the most sense in your language.

1. Look in https://svn.torproject.org/svn/website/trunk/en/ for a set of ".wml" files. The most important ones to translate are listed as "high priority", "medium priority", and "low priority" on the translation status page. You can look at https://svn.torproject.org/svn/website/trunk/de/ for examples of the desired translation formats.
2. The first line in the translated file should be
   # Based-On-Revision: 13000
   where 13000 is the revision number of the original English page. This lets you easily spot when a page gets out of date. The revision number is found at the top on each page -- you can either look at the files in the https://svn.torproject.org/svn/website/trunk/en/ directory, or manually checkout the latest version of the website.
3. The second line in the translated file should be the email address of the translator:
   # Last-Translator: abc at example.com
   so we can get ahold of you if the pages needs to be corrected or updated. (Since the pages will be posted on the web and spammers will find them, you may want to obfuscate your email address or use a separate one.)
4. We would also like some translations for the diagrams on the overview page. You can just send us the text that should go in the diagrams, and we'll take care of making new versions of the pictures.
5. Translated pages should link to the other translated pages. In general this is automatic: writing <page download> will automatically link to the translated version of that page if there is one, and the English version otherwise.
6. Use valid character entities. Even though most browsers display the characters correctly these days, we want to be on the safe side, so we don't get bug reports from people who can't read the text. If you need to use a character set other than ISO-8859-1, add something like CHARSET="UTF-8" to the end of the line that starts with #include "head.wmi".
7. Keep your translation valid XHTML. Once it's in place, you can test your page at validator.w3.org.
8. When you have some pages ready, send them to the tor-translation alias on the contact page. (If you have changes to existing pages, please use the diff tool to generate patch files, if possible.) If you plan to stick around and keep maintaining them, let us know and we'll be happy to give you an SVN account to manage them directly.

Other projects related to Tor also need translators. Please see our translation portal for translating other useful and related software.