Hey there!

Just like that, the first quarter of the year is over. We have enjoyed the past three months, as we have had quite a bit of facetime with some of you recently. More, please, across time zones–and hopefully, in person, right?!

Such a short intro because we can’t contain our excitement to tell you our BIG news… we are officially launching our Contributor of the Month feature! 🥳

Localization Lab has been around for a decade, and we have worked with almost 8,000 amazing people whose stories and context are worthy of celebration and honor.

Starting March this year, we have decided to feature one awesome person each month whose contribution and dedication to our work have been noteworthy, for which we, as an organization, are deeply grateful.

Cool, but what are the criteria?
There is no set criteria but it is a mix of informal feedback from project owners, co-contributors, and us.
If I get nominated, what do I get?
Our prize package is still evolving but we currently can write letters of recommendation, certificates, and endorsements over LinkedIn (or other platforms you may want). Not to mention, we also would like to publish an interview-style blog with you over the Localization Lab website to know more about your work and share that with the community.
Nice, do I need to use my real name though?

Those nominated do not need to use their real name. If you wish to be anonymous throughout the whole feature, that is fine! You can give us a chosen name.

With that…. Our Contributor of the Month for March 2024 is Fadoua Bouaouda!
Despite being new to the community, Fadoua’s commitment and passion have been outstanding, helping us make CENO, Tella, Check, and SAFETAG (and many other internet freedom tools) accessible in Arabic.

We’ll soon publish a blog post with her in the coming weeks so watch out for that.

Community Events
Community Training Series

Thanks to everybody who attended the second training session, Translation Strategies on March 14, 2024. The notes are in here. A PDF copy of the presentation is available upon request.

The last session of our ‘Getting Started’ series will focus on glossary management and will be held on April 25, 2024, at 13:00 UTC (you can check for your local time here).

Room details below:
Join Zoom Meeting (you do not need an account to join)
Meeting ID: 843 2610 6146
Passcode: 263697

At the end of this last training in this series, we will be sending the certificates to those who attended all three sessions. Please make sure the details you have given us are correct. Do reach out to us if you have any questions or concerns.

Localization in the Community

One of our contributors has developed an Internet Shutdown Preparation Guide for Myanmar Citizen Journalists.

Cover page of the Internet Shutdown Preparation Guide for Myanmar Citizen Journalists.

The guidebook contains tips and recommendations that will assist citizen journalists in navigating internet shutdowns. Resources such as these are important as they provide access to information in a context that is familiar to the target users. As Localization Lab, we applaud this effort and hope to see more contributors sharing resources and tools they have designed for their communities. The Internet Shutdown Preparation Guide is available for download here.

The month in numbers!

This month, we translated a total of 89,696 words, edited 151,847 words, and reviewed 361,005 words.
Wow, we collectively worked on 602,548 words - thank you community!

Support needed to localize tools and resources:

A lot of projects are still underway, see below. We appreciate any help we can get in making these tools and resources available in local languages. If you find a project on the list that your community would benefit from and you’d like to support by localizing, please reach out to us and we’ll onboard you.

Psiphon (Amharic, Burmese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Tigrinya, Oromo but other languages are also welcome!)
Psiphon ‘How-To’ summary guide (Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Farsi
Mailvelope (Spanish)
SAFETAG (Arabic, Burmese, French, Russian, Spanish)
Bitmask (Arabic, Chinese (Traditional), Farsi, French, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian but other languages are also welcome!)
OnionShare (all languages)
Tor (please see here what the high-priority languages are!)
Tella (Belarusian, Burmese, French, Indonesian, Jingpho, Kannada, Russian, Tamil)
Shira (Hindi, Indonesian, Russian, Swahili)

User feedback needed
These projects are also seeking user feedback.

Save app (available in Arabic, Spanish, and Ukrainian)
Psiphon Pro (available in several languages!)
Tella (available in several languages!)

If you have time, play around with these tools and let us know your thoughts. Do you like them, did you notice any issues with translations, design, user experience, or anything else? Please send us your thoughts at adriano@localizationlab.org or maja@localizationlab.org.

Are you interested in becoming a contributor?

We always welcome new contributors. If you know anyone who might be interested in joining our community, please send them this sign-up link. You can also send us their contact information, and we will personally invite them to join.

Warmly,
Chido, Dianne, Maja, Adriano, and the rest of the Localization Lab team

Fun trivia: We asked the team if their mother tongues have loan words that have a completely different meaning from their source. Interesting!

Filipino: Almusal (breakfast) from the Spanish almozar (to have lunch)
Shona: Gonyeti (semi-truck) from the English “Is it gone yet?”
Brazilian Portuguese: outdoor – in Brazilian Portuguese we use ‘outdoor’ to refer to a billboard!
Croatian: Dolčevita (turtleneck shirt) comes from the Italian dolce vita (sweet life) – here’s an interesting explanation of how this came to be.