Translating KA Lite

We release a “content pack” for a language once a sufficient portion of the content (videos and user interface) have been translated.

There are two aspects to translation of KA Lite:

  • Translating the KA content itself (dubbing videos, subtitling, and translating titles/descriptions). This is done through Khan Academy. Only videos that are included on official Khan Academy YouTube language channels, and mapped to their English counterparts in Khan Academy’s API, will be included in KA Lite.

  • Translating the KA Lite interface text. For user interface translations, we use a website called CrowdIn. In order to contribute translations, follow the steps below:

    1. Sign up for the KA Lite Volunteer Translation Group.
    2. Create an account on CrowdIn, our online translations portal.
    3. Start contributing translations on CrowdIn! You will want to focus on the files for the version you’re targeting – for instance, to translate the strings for KA Lite 0.14, you should focus on translating strings in 0.14-django.po and 0.14-djangojs.po.

Creating new source translations

Facilitators of CrowdIn should do the following each time that a new major release approaches:

  1. Navigate to the root of your ka-lite git checkout. Make sure your environment is activated.

  2. Run:

    make msgids

  3. After this, you should have updated files in locale/.

  4. Commit the files to Github in a PR and have them merged. We track these changes in Git to ensure a transparent mechanism for changes.

  5. Upload the files with their versioned file names to CrowdIn.

Legacy

Our translations have worked slightly differently since they were introduced in 0.11. On CrowdIn, we have older versions avaiable, for which 0.14 through to 0.16 all contain translation strings from the central server (the one running on hub.learningequality.org).

As of 0.17, we have started to maintain the English source messages in Git and will sync them to CrowdIn after each string freeze.