FAQs
First steps
The first step for translating Early Buddhist Texts in Bilara is to discuss your project with Bhante Sujato. Please message Bhante @sujato directly.
If you’d like to translate SuttaCentral’s website files to your language, that’s also done in Bilara. Let Bhante know and we’ll set up a website project for you.
Before getting started in Bilara please review the Guide for translators and let us know if you have any questions.
Project set up
Once you’ve discussed your project with Bhante, send me a message (@carmi) with your:
- GitHub username
- Full name
- Project type (e.g. a whole sutta project, a Nikāya such as sutta/dn, or a SuttaCentral website project)
- The language you will be translating to.
Help
Ayya @sabbamitta is a Bilara power user and will often be the first to respond to questions 
At the moment the Bilara community has over 25 translators 
Translation languages include Burmese, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, English, Finnish, German, Gujarati, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Sinhalese, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
Let us know if your language is missing or if you’d like to contribute to one of the languages listed. There’s always an opportunity to help in some way!
Ready to publish
The Guide for translators outlines the publication process. It’s ok to publish one text at a time, whatever works best for you. The publication process can take up to a week. This is because there are a few manual steps behind the scene. Bhante and I will check the files that come through via GitHub before sending them to the queue to be published on the SuttaCentral website. If you are publishing EBTs I will get in touch with you for your publication details.
Once your translation is published you can keep working on it in Bilara as long as you wish. Many translators do this, publishing updates over time.
The Bilara community is here to help so please reach out!