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Translation is a rewarding hobby accessible to nearly anyone with basic technical know-how and solid language abilities. Many volunteers, including high school students, regularly contribute, so professional expertise isn’t necessary.

Translation work requires:

Good knowledge of computer usage and software
Basic information about the operating system used
Basic information about software construction
Good knowledge of Finnish
Reasonable English language skills

It is a good idea to have background knowledge in the subject matter and concepts of the software, especially when translating special programs.

The main rule of translation is that you learn by doing. Surely no one is able to make error-free translations outright, but translation always requires careful research into the software to be translated - and similar other software - in order to ensure that the meaning of the concepts is understood correctly.

The importance of quality work cannot be overemphasized, and it is worthwhile to make using dictionaries, automatic proofreading and other tools routine.

What to translate?

Translating the user interfaces of the programs is always a priority. The good thing about them is that the strings are usually short, making them also grammatically simple. Thus, they are well suited for beginners to translate.

Information about the different translation projects is available on this website. Remember to pay attention to the quality of the translations.

The contextual interface entities are as follows:

Operating environment

The operating environment covers the computer's background desktop, menus, settings programs, and other basic programs that are needed to start and use other programs. Certain windows of software, such as file opening and saving, color selections, and user settings, are also often common components in the operating environment. Therefore, the basic libraries should be particularly carefully translated.
Operating environments include: KDE and Gnome desktop environments.

File manager and Internet

File management and Internet programs, such as the Web browser and email, are the most commonly used applications by all user groups.
File management programs include: Gnome Nautilus and KDE's Dolphin. Web browsers e.g. Mozilla Firefox, Gnome Web and Konqueror. Email programs e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird and Kontact.

Games and education software

Games and education programs are especially important program groups for young users and other beginners, so they should be especially carefully translated.
Playing games very often requires reading the rules of the game from the user manual, so it is especially important to translate the instructions for use of the games.

Office programs

Office programs are the most used application programs used at work, at home and at school. Their user base is large and a large number of users do not speak English at all.
Office software includes e.g. LibreOffice and Nextcloud.

General applications

These include drawing programs, text editors, dictionary programs, and other programs that are located between basic applications and special applications. They are important to translate, albeit secondary to the operating environment.

Special applications

These include audio editors, video editing software, financial administration programs, and other special programs that are used only by a very small part of the user base. These are worth translating these carefully. Translating them also requires expertise in the application area.
Software development aids are special applications, the user group of which can usually be expected to have sufficient skills of the English language.

System programs

System programs are quite technical in nature, so their user base can be better expected to have English language skills and thus not prioritized.

Usage instructions

In-service instructions pages, user guides and other documentation are ordinary prose text with long grammatical and relevant structures compared to user interfaces. They are much more demanding than the actual user interfaces.

Translating the user interfaces of the programs is more important than the usage instructions, because if the user interface of the programs is clear (and well translated), no instructions should be needed during normal use. An exception to this is, for example, games, the instructions of which are often necessary to read in order to understand the rules of the game.

The order of importance of the software user manuals is the same as above for user interfaces.

Web sites

The web sites of many open source software and other volunteer projects can be translated into local languages. For example the web sites of Debian GNU/Linux and Fedora Linux have been translated into Finnish. Other volunteer projects worth mentioning are Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap.

Quality Control

Quality work is an easy way to participate in translation work, as it may not even be necessary to install the translatable program on your own computer (although it is desirable to find out its concepts).

Software development

If you have the skills to do programming work, you should definitely participate in existing open source projects or publish your own programs as open source.