Are you fluent in a modern language and would like to help the SuttaCentral project without knowing Pāli? Here’s how!
The SuttaCentral.net main website is designed to have the user interface translated into modern languages. Currently there are a few languages with the interface translated:
See Currently translated
- English
- Deutsch
- Français
- Indonesian
- Português
- Polski (completed by @candidate)
- 汉语
- Español (@Gabriel_L)
- Italiano (@Gabriel_L)
- Ру́сский язы́к (@dhammagift)
- සිංහල (@dhammadana3200)
- Suomi: Finnish (@Mika )
- Slovenščina (BB)
- Nederlands: Dutch (Ven. BoSi)
- Norsk: Norwegian (Ven. SD)
- မြန်မာဘာသာ (A)
- 日本語: Japanese (@Kaz)
- ไทย: Thai (@kora & @Dheerayupa)
- हिन्दी Hindi (@trusolo)
- ગુજરાતી (@trusolo)
- मराठी (@trusolo )
- Čeština: Czech (Mr T.V. via @sarana working on)
For example:
These are some of the language that need to have interface translations:
Number of text translations on SuttaCentral are given in [brackets]
- Tiếng Việt: Vietnamese (incomplete, needs volunteer) [8259]
- বাংলা Bengali [8259]
- Català: Catalan [554]
- Afrikaans
- اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ Arabic
- فارسی Farsi
- עִבְֿרִיתּ Hebrew
- Hrvatski: Croatian
- ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi: Hawaiian language
- Lietuvių Kalba: Lithuanian [225]
- Magyar: Hungarian [410]
- Română: Romanian
- Slovenčina: Slovak [259]
- Srpski: Serbian [402]
- Svenska: Swedish
- தமிழ்: Tamil
- ಕನ್ನಡ: Kannada
- 한국어/조선말: Korean
What is involved
There are about 290 lines to be translated, some as short as one word. Altogether there are about 1400 words. Depending on your skill, it will probably take from 1 to 3 hrs.
How to get started
- Post a comment to let us know what you want to work on.
- Go to this web page and download the file using this button:
- In a text editor (like Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac), replace the second part of each line with the translation into the target language. For example, in this line:
"dictionary:activateChineseLookup": "Activate Chinese word lookup",
Leave "dictionary:activateChineseLookup":
and translate Activate Chinese word lookup
We can also give you a spreadsheet with the text, including an auto-translation by Google to get you started.
You can find an explanation of some of the tricky items here.
When you are done
Post a link to the finished file in this thread. We will work on getting it uploaded to the site and ready for the public to use.
There are, of course, other parts of the website that can be translated, including Bhante Sujato’s essays. Most of the files found here can be translated, although to do those you should probably be set up on the Bilara translation software.
If you are interested or just have questions, please comment below.
If you know someone on the forum who might like to help, please mention them using an @
before their user name in a comment below. If you know someone not on the forum who might like to help, please show them this thread.
For geeky stuff, click here
It is possible to get a live json file of all the languages and their completeness status using the API. Or just load https://suttacentral.net/api/languages?all=false
Wondering why the English interface json file is found in the directory of root
languages? Well, for the site, English is the root. This also allows the use of Bilara to do internationalization of the site. The interface translations are found in the /site/
directory for each language, e.g. https://github.com/suttacentral/bilara-data/tree/published/translation/de/site