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Guidelines: Translating OONI Explorer

OONI Explorer is an open data resource on internet censorship around the world. Since 2012, millions of network measurements have been collected from more than 200 countries. OONI Explorer sheds light on internet censorship and other forms of network interference worldwide.

By translating the OONI Explorer interface, you are enabling researchers, journalists, and human rights defenders to track internet censorship in their countries!

Translating OONI Explore is therefore important, and the OONI team can't thank you enough.

We hope the following brief guidelines are helpful. If they're not, please reach out to us at [email protected].

View OONI Explorer

Before getting started with the translation, we kindly ask that you first view OONI Explorer to see where your translation would appear and to familiarize yourself with the platform.

You can learn all about OONI Explorer here. We also explain the Measurement Aggregation Toolkit (MAT) -- hosted on OONI Explorer -- here.

General recommendations

Please do not use machine translation as a foundation for your translation. If you are not sure about the terms, ask for advice from someone with technological expertise or from our Slack community. Do not fear to communicate with other translators through Transifex — you can leave comments, questions and suggestions in the comments of strings.

Check Localization Lab's Wiki for more detailed recommendations.

Strings for translation

Thanks to support from the Localization Lab, the translation of OONI Explorer is coordinated on Transifex.

To translate OONI Explorer, please sign-up with Transifex to the OONI project: https://www.transifex.com/otf/ooni-explorer/

Style of translation

The content on OONI Explorer is meant to be informal and direct (but still polite).

We therefore share the following recommendations:

  • Use the informal form when referring to the user (for example, you can use the singular form of "you", instead of the plural form for formality -- if you think it is acceptable in your language)

  • Use gender-neutral terminology when referring to the user

  • Be concise (but clear) to fit the translation within potential character limits

  • When/if possible, think about localization beyond translation (for example, you can include "GR" as the country code for "Greece" in the Greek translation) - without changing the meaning or adding any new information that may be inaccurate

Translation of technical terms

OONI Explorer has a fair amount of technical terminology.

Here are some tips:

  1. Please avoid translating the OONI Probe test names listed on OONI Explorer (you can keep the English versions), such as:
  • Web Connectivity
  • WhatsApp
  • Facebook Messenger
  • Telegram
  • Signal
  • HTTP Header Field Manipulation
  • HTTP Invalid Request Line
  • NDT
  • DASH
  • Psiphon
  • Tor
  • Tor Snowflake
  • Vanilla Tor
  • RiseupVPN
  • DNS Check
  • STUN Reachability
  • URL Getter

  1. You can consider avoiding the translation of "middleboxes", since this term is often used as is by the international tech community.

  2. Not all technical terms (such as caching, ping, endpoints, etc) are translated by tech communities around the world (particularly if their translation does not make much sense). Often, such terms are used in English, or they're Englishized. If you're unsure how specific technical terms are used in your language by technologists, you can try Googling in your language for those terms (for example, by checking relevant publications), or reach out to a technologist (if you know one).

  3. We also advise against the translation of "OONI", "OONI Probe", "OONI Explorer", and "OONI MAT".

Things to watch out for

  • Use of singular & plural forms: Once you get started with the translation, you'll probably notice that several strings appear to have duplicate copy (such as those for terms like "tested", "blocked", "accessible"). These aren't duplicates, as they are meant to support both the singular and plural forms of verbs (for many languages, other than English). Please pay attention to the comments provided inside the strings, indicating whether a term should be translated to singular or plural form.

  • Composite strings: You'll come across certain strings that include variables, such as: OONI Probe users in **{countryName}** have collected [**{measurementCount}** measurements]⏎. This means that a number (or another variable) will appear on the platform in the place of {[measurementCount}} (for example, 801045) and a name of the country will appear instead of {countryName}(for example, Canada). Please do not translate these variables, but position them in the location where they would make sense in the translated sentence.

  • New lines: You'll notice that some blue arrows are included in some strings. These arrows indicate that the next sentence will be in a new line. Please preserve these arrows in your translation in the same order as provided in the original copy.

  • Punctuation marks: Please try (to the degree possible) to preserve the same punctuation marks (commas, exclamation marks, etc.) as those included in the original copy.

Questions? You can reach the OONI team for real-time discussion on Slack, or you can drop us an email at [email protected].

Thank you for your support! We are extremely grateful!