W3C Translations

Introduction

The working language of the W3C is US English. The official version of a W3C document is the US English language version at the W3C site. The W3C tries to reach as many people and organizations around the world as possible. But translating specifications is a lot of work, and we need your help. We made it easy to help us with translations, and invite you to volunteer to translate some W3C specification and other documents, alone or together with somebody else.

How to Volunteer

First, search. Existing translations can be found by using the search facilities on this page. In order to avoid duplications, you must check whether the document you intend to translate has alreay been translated. Additionally, please, check the w3c-translators@w3.org mailing list archives for existing intention to translate that document. If you know about a translation that is not listed here, please write to w3c-translators@w3.org.

If the URI of the document you plan to translate starts with http://www.w3.org/International/ the process varies a little from the other W3C volunteer translations, and you should follow these instructions.

Before you start a translation, please make sure you have read the information on translations in our W3C Intellectual Property FAQ. Your translation(s) will need to bear a prominent disclaimer in which you disclose, (1) the title of and link to the original English document, (2) that your document is a translation which may contain errors, and (3) that the original English document on the W3C website is the one that is official. (Items (2) and (3) must be in the target language.)

Second, announce your intention. After you've performed the above-mentioned search, and before you start translating, please, send a notification by e-mail to the w3c-translators@w3.org mailing-list, and let us know the title(s) and URI(s) of the document(s). You're encouraged to use the template e-mail [Intention of translation].

We expect you to make sure the links within your translation(s) are valid and to endeavour to provide valid markup and CSS (validation tools are at http://validator.w3.org/).

Third, announce your translation(s). When you've completed your translation(s), please, send a notification by e-mail to the w3c-translators@w3.org mailing-list, and let us know the English and target language title(s) and URI(s) of the document(s). You're encouraged to use the template e-mail [Completed translation].

What to translate

W3C publishes various types of documents, including drafts in the Recommendation tracks (working drafts, candidate recommendations, etc.), W3C Notes, courses, activity home pages, presentations, etc. We strongly encourage translators to concentrate on specific documents only, namely:

W3C Recommendations: these are stable documents, their translations will have the greatest impact.

Group Notes: these represent Working Group (or Interest Group) output and may be useful as support material for a Recommendation.

W3C Outreach materials: these documents may be very useful but please note that they do not necessarily represent the consensus of W3C and may be unstable. You should contact the author(s) before translating to confirm the stability of the document.

Some W3C groups may suggest additional documents to translate:

WAI has published a prioritized list of accessibility documents to translate,

the QA activity has labelled by "[translation welcomed]" these documents in their document library,

the Internationalization Activity welcomes translations of its articles and tutorials when sanctioned by the Activity Lead.

Working Drafts, Candidate Recommendations, Proposed Recommendations, and other W3C Web pages may change by the time the translation is published, thereby obsoleting the translation. This may also give wrong information to experts in a specific language community. They may not be aware of the details of the W3C Process and may be misled to believe that the translation referred to via these pages is the translation of a stable document. For these reasons, such translations are not added to the database that is referred to in these pages.

It is, however, recognized that in some cases translations of Recommendation Track drafts might be useful for the development process, for reviewing, etc. If you want to contribute to those, please contact the relevant working group; a reference to your translation may be added to the working group's document list.

Discussion fora

For notifying us about starting or completing a translation (required), we have created the publicly archived w3c-translators@w3.org mailing list. This list can also be used to discuss questions you have when translating. To subscribe to this list, please send an email to w3c-translators-request@w3.org with the word "subscribe" in the subject line (include the word "unsubscribe" if you want to unsubscribe). You can also browse through the archives of that list, or search it using this form:

There are also some language specific mailing lists and discussion fora for translations in French, Hungarian (a wiki page for Hungarian translators is also available), and in Simplified Chinese.

Glossaries

General, W3C related glossaries are available in Arabic, Chinese (both Simplified and Traditional), German, and Korean. The Glossary of Terms for Device Independence has also been translated to French, Italian, Polish, and Spanish.

Internationalization

Related to translations is the Internationalization Activity. Its task is to make the content of the W3C specifications useful not only for English-speaking or Latin-writing part of the world, but truly worldwide. Please, consult the home page of that activity if you want to join.

Further Information About this Site

Currently, this page refers to 1295 translations in 50 languages. This includes 435 translations of W3C Recommendations, and 860 translations of other documents, such as tutorials, notes, member or team submissions, guidelines, etc.

If you are curious about how translations are managed at W3C and how you can access this information, you can consult our separate page on translation management. This may be particulary interesting if you wish to maintain your own list of translation references either on a particular technology or language.

Announcements of new translations added to this site can also be syndicated using RSS 1.0 (an RDF vocabulary used for site summaries) and are also available in the archives.

Ivan Herman. Please send comments on this page to the W3C Communication team (w3t-comm@w3.org).

The queries rely on the following RDF files: tr.rdf, Trans2005.rdf, Trans2006.rdf, Trans2007.rdf, Trans2008.rdf, Trans2009.rdf, TransTo2004.rdf, extras.rdf, langInfo.rdf, translators.rdf, docGroups.rdf, recs.rdf, commented.rdf, deadDucks.rdf, and extraControls.rdf.