Intro for Volunteer Translators
Eager to help with translations of your favorite website or application and want to know where to start? Check the instructions below to proceed.
What is Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is a practice that engages a community for one common goal – to translate the product on a volunteer basis into several languages. You, as a volunteer translator, can do translations through Crowdin and help the organization with the localization process.
Account Configuration
In case you you are not registered in Crowdin you can create an account or sign up using your social media profiles (Google, Facebook, Twitter), GitHub, or GitLab profiles.
Click the profile photo in the top right corner to access Settings. There you’ll be able to modify your personal information, manage profile security and notifications. You can also define Preferred languages for translations.
Join Translation Project
There are several ways to find a project to contribute to:
- if a direct project link was initially provided use it to immediately access the project page
- if you want to contribute to the specific public project use a Search field in the head menu to find it
- if you want to apply specific filter (e.g., target languages, platform) to find a public project use Advanced Search
Explore Your Workspace
As soon as you find and open the needed project the following tabs will be accessible.
- Home
The page with a list of project languages, the main project details and the list of project managers.
Click on the needed language to access files for translations. You can also use Translate All button to access all project strings at once.Note: Some projects might have a moderated project joining. Click Join to submit an access request to a specific language and wait until a project manager confirms it.
You can check all the projects you joined at the Profile page.
-
Activity
The page where all the project activity is shown. For example, comments, newly joined users, translated, and proofread strings.
-
Reports
The page where you can see the project status and view the project’s top members.
Crowdsourcing projects don’t usually have financial rewards for translations. So you can use My Contribution report to check the overall amount of the strings you translated and proofread without setting the rates.
Check User Reports article for more details.
-
Discussions
The page with the project-related conversations. You can participate in already existing discussions or create a new topic if necessary.
- Tasks
The page that contains the list of tasks assigned to you (if any).
Work in the Editor
Menu 
in the top left corner allows you to switch between files for translations, change translation language, contact manager, configure the view or quit editor.
All the translations are mainly done in Editor and it has four main sections as shown below.
Below you can check a quick overview of these sections. To know more about all the functions and options available in it, check the Online Editor article.
Section 1 (Left sidebar)
In the left section, you will see the list of strings for translation. Strings are text elements which are either individual words, expressions, or sentences. Some of them might have replacement tokens ({0}, {1}, or %1) or elements of ICU message syntax. To work with such strings, you should copy the source string and translate only the real words.
Section 2 (Middle-top area)
Middle-top section is the main working area with the source string on the top and translation section below. The Context to the string is shown right below the source string. You can request context from project managers from here if necessary. In the translation window, you may also see the maximum length of the translation limit in case it’s exceeded.
Section 3 (Middle-bottom area)
This section contains all the resources and previous translations you might use:
- Translations by other project participants
- Translation Memory (TM) suggestions
- Machine Translation (MT) engines suggestions
- Translations to other languages
Section 4 (Right sidebar)
You can use this section to discuss the meaning of the source string or other related questions with your colleagues. You can mention the particular person you’d like to address or create an issue related to the string.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Click keyboard 
icon in the top right corner to check the list of available shortcuts. They will help to take actions in the Editor quickly.
All hotkeys can be customized. Click on the necessary key combination, and modify it with the help of your keyboard.
Voting view
This mode allows you to vote up or down the translations of strings made by your colleagues.
Click the Menu icon in the top left corner then choose View > Voting. To vote click on the plus sign if you like the translation, minus – if the translation doesn’t seem correct. Translations that get the most positive votes will then appear on the top of all the translations available for the string.
