Basecamp is being used by companies all over the globe, but until today they’ve had to make do with a user interface in English. That might be fine for creative professionals used to dealing with English in their company, but it’s often a problem for dealing with clients who are more comfortable in their native tongue. We’re tackling that problem today.
The Basecamp interface has been translated into nine languages already and we have even more coming. The languages that are going live today are French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazillian), Dutch, Greek, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish. Italian, Russian, and Slovak are not far behind and will be ready soon.
You can change the language of any company in Basecamp by going to the edit company screen and picking from the language drop-down.
Everyone from that company will now see Basecamp in the selected language. (We’re open to making localization a person-by-person option, but we’re just starting with companies for now.)
Getting a translated interface just right is hard, though. So it’s unlikely that all of these translations are perfect out the gate. But we wanted to get them out there and get some feedback on what we need to improve.
We’ve set up a dedicated mailing list for translations to help connect people willing to work on improvements.
The translation team
We couldn’t have done this without an amazing team working on translations. We’d like to extend a big thank you to the following translators for their hard work. I did a fair share of the Danish translation myself and I can tell you that it’s harder than it sounds to translate the 2,000 strings needed for Basecamp.
- French by Christophe Porteneuve from Ciblo
- Spanish by Nacho Carretero from Albucasis Traducciones Especializadas and José Espinal
- Portuguese (Brazillian) by Rafael Rosa from Ruby Inside Brasil
- Dutch by Helen Potters
- Greek by Petros Amiridis
- Polish by Piotr Petrus from riddle.pl
- Norwegian by Henrik Hodne
- Danish by Jakob Skjerning from Substance Lab and yours truly
- Swedish by Fredrik Mårtenson
If your language is not on the lists mentioned, we could use your help. We’re looking for volunteer Basecamp users that would use the application in their own language to help make it available. Please write [email protected] with the subject “Translate Basecamp into LANGUAGE” if you’d like to help.
The Rails infrastructure
The technical side of things relies on the excellent i18n infrastructure already present in Ruby on Rails and a new tool we developed called Tolk. It gives translators a web interface for updating the phrases and can even track things like updated strings. It made translating Basecamp much simpler. It’s completely open source and free for anyone else to use. Enjoy!
Anonymous Coward
on 05 May 10Hej David – ‘adresse’ er kun med eet d på dansk :)
DHH
on 05 May 10Haha, eeks, jeg må være blevet amerikaniseret lidt for meget på det seneste. Vil straks få det opdateret.
Brazilian Guy
on 05 May 10Parabéns pela novidade!
Anonymous Coward
on 05 May 10^^
Anonymous Coward: Hi David – ‘address’ is only one ‘d’ in Danish :)
DHH: Haha, eek, I must have been Americanized a bit too much recently. I’ll get updated immediately.
…for the lazy. :)
Eric Sousa
on 05 May 10Basecamp in portuguese, great. I will use much more.
Anas Qtiesh
on 05 May 10Hello,
I tried sending the following message to the group but it didn’t work. Here it goes:Sebastian Dadał
on 05 May 10I’d like to thank all the translators for their efforts, especially my fellow Pole Piotr Petrus.
I’m totally excited about using Basecamp with my local customers.
Richard McIntyre
on 05 May 10That’s great news! I am still waiting for Japanese, I am sure it will be there soon.
A big thanks also for the open source translation tool, it is amazing that you make a tool for yourselves but open it to the whole rails community. You guys are amazing.
Peter Baker
on 05 May 10I’m curious why this wasn’t something you’d pay for? I mean obviously if you’re able to get volunteers to do it, by all means do it. But if it was as daunting as you make it out to be, surely their time was worth compensation?
Giancarlo Corzo
on 05 May 10Hope spanish translation is a more international one, a lot of transtalations are made in spain with their local words.
Robert Laing
on 06 May 10Hey guys,
Great to see :) I remember back in 2005 trying to hack a GreaseMonkey script to show a Japanese version of Basecamp to our clients. Wasn’t pretty!
You might look into the myGengo human translation API – which now allows you to order and receive human translation within any app.
Could be cool for optional translation of messages and comments within Basecamp!
DHH
on 06 May 10Peter, we were more interested in getting actual users of Basecamp involved, rather than professional translators. Basecamp will continue to evolve and need new copy, so having someone involved where it’s in their own best interest to keep the languages updated seemed like a better solution. (Also, all translators who complete a translation are getting comped accounts.)
Frank
on 06 May 10@DHH
Okay, so pay the actual users of Basecamp who have the necessary skills.
Real work, real value. Pay them. You’re super-duper profitable, right? It seems fair to me if they’re opening a new market for you.
Libo
on 06 May 10Frank, Peter: I am the italian translator. I am happy and I am not payed… Money are not so important, really.
I have enlarged my professional network meeting motivated people all around the world, almost all the translators have IT backgrounds. Working with them was a nice experience.
David invented and developed the tool I use every day: rails. It makes my life easier every day. I thought it was time to return the favor.
Henrik Nyh
on 06 May 10In the “Tolk” screenshot, “takes affect” should be “takes effect”.
Christophe Porteneuve
on 06 May 10@Frank, @Peter: although I certainly think you should, as a rule of thumb, get paid for a job, there certainly is a place for labors of love and gratitude.
Labors of love, as in FLOSS. But then, FLOSS project leaders, for instance, generally don’t make (any significant amount of) money out of their project, so contributors not getting paid isn’t unfair (not to mention they’re making their lives better by scratching their own itch, most of the time).
Labors of gratitude, as in “I use Rails all day for client projects and this makes my life so much better, PLUS we use Basecamp all day to manage 200+ active client projects and we just couldn’t live without it anymore, so here, let me give back a pinch.”
When 37signals called for translators, they made it clear this wasn’t a paying gig, so someone uncomfortable with that could just pass. And I believe the “37signals spirit” posts in SvN help see that the company isn’t greedy or miserly in any way.
Just my two cents,
GeeIWonder
on 06 May 10Spanish, Portuguese (Brazillian) [...] Greek
Basecamp—the insolvent edition.
Mark
on 06 May 10Good stuff. Congrats!
Mark T
on 06 May 10What Henrik said – your English needs translating. Even the string “address” says “affect”. ;-)
Bastian Nutzinger
on 06 May 10/me wants german translation! Any plans about that?
Kahlil Lechelt
on 06 May 10Yeah I need BC in German too. I am happy to help. Already sent an email…
Deltaplan
on 06 May 10Cool feature, it will definitively become useful for us when each user will be able to choose his own language, since almost every company in our Basecamp account have people with only English as a common language…
BTW, any idea if a translation in Chinese will be technically easy (otherwise than the translation of the texts itself of course) ?
A must would be to be able to specify multilingual user content. Expecially when sending group messages to people, it would be extremely good to be able to do things like this :
to the people who have chosen English as favorite language, send : “Dear customer, here is the new version of the product” to the people who have chosen French as favorite language, send : “Chers client, voici la dernière version du produit”Peter Baker
on 06 May 10Basecamp is not a labor of love for 37 Signals. It’s a wildly successful commercial product, and you “give back” by paying for it.
I’m not saying they’re greedy for getting volunteers to handle their translations, I’m saying it feels somehow antithetical to many of the principles 37S puts out there; don’t give away the things you work for, your time is valuable – charge appropriately for it, be real, etc.
Diego Martinez
on 06 May 10Thank you for the Portuguese version! Our brazilian clients that dosent speak english are grateful.
Yuka Young
on 06 May 10I’ve personally worked on translating both 37signals’ books into Japanese. If it wasn’t for volunteering for “Getting Real”, I wouldn’t be getting paid for “Rework” either. It’s a job opportunity, a chance to show people what you can do.
David, if there’s already a Japanese translation in the works, I’d like to help. If not, just give me what needs to be done, and I’ll get right on it :)
Richard Howis
on 06 May 10In the “Tolk” screenshot, “your” = “jeres” (or possibly “din”), and not “vores”.
Jan
on 06 May 10Hey there,
what about German? Is it coming soon?
Thanks, Jan
Mark
on 06 May 10warum kein Deutsch? vielleicht, nicht genug Kunden, oder?
Peter
on 07 May 10deutsch scheint nicht so beliebt zu sein. bei der länderauswahl ist deutschland auch nicht unter den top 10, obowhl in einer aufstellung mal zu sehen war, dass deutschland ein großer markt ist. schade, echt.
Pierre
on 07 May 10Merci !
DHH
on 07 May 10We got some good folks working on German now. It should be coming soon!
Julian
on 07 May 10Why not German? Did you chose languages based on usage by that country? Does that make sense? “Many people from France are using it so we are translating it into French” Wouldn’t “only few people in Germany are using it, so let’s translate it into German” made have more sense?
Nathan Youngman
on 07 May 10Hey David. Thanks for releasing Tolk as open source… we’re needing something exactly like this, and it’s sure nice to see something that integrates with Rails.
Nicole
on 07 May 10I’ll help translate the free version, but if you want me to translate the other versions, you’ll need to purchase an upgrade :)
Emil
on 09 May 10I’ve tried to use the swedish translation but I can’t. Swedish doesn’t work as a software language. It’s ugly on OS X, the iPhone and now on Basecamp. But I guess it attracts more people to start using the app.
It would be interesting the read more about how your internationalization strategy works. If features will be delayed because they need to be translated into X languages.
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Warren Henning
on 10 May 10^ Hm, looks like it’s a good thing this blog has rel=nofollow links.
Nick Novitski
on 10 May 10I look forward to seeing how you will support customers in 9 languages.
Scott
on 12 May 10Translation seems like a big obstacle to agile development, especially with volunteer translators, unless you are willing to have some part of the application untranslated.
For the product I work on, we get a week turnaround on our translations (to 12 languages) and think that’s pretty good.
Matt
on 12 May 10great idea. good example set by the Basecamp people. you should contact Tomedes. They have provided us great translation services for a very low price. I’m sure they will help you. their website is on http://www.tomedes.com . I think they are using Basecamp
This discussion is closed.