Translators

In mid-2018, the GBIF Secretariat started working with Spanish and Japanese speakers from across our community with the goal or reduce the role of language as a barrier to free and open biodiversity data. Their pilot effort soon sparked new parallel ones for other languages, and thanks to the aid and support of the volunteer translators listed below, the user interface and key content on GBIF.org now appear in ten languages:

• English
• Arabic
• Spanish
• French
• Russian
• Simplified Chinese
• Japanese
• Portuguese
• Traditional Chinese
• Ukrainian

The release of the Russian and Arabic translations in August 2020 fulfilled a commitment GBIF made in its 2018 work programme to support all six official UN languages.

Two technology platforms have supported these efforts through free non-commercial licences that enable us to streamline the work of managing our multilingual content: CrowdIn, which we use for translations of the user interface, and Contentful, the content management system used for all non-data pages on GBIF.org. We are most grateful to these and the other companies we rely on to support and maintain GBIF’s open-source infrastructure.

Community members also contribute to other GBIF-related translations, including material for the EU-funded Biodiversity Information for Development (BID) programme and the alliance for biodiversity knowledge, which extended the core set of languages to include Basque, Catalan and Dutch.

Can I join the GBIF translator community?

The work of translation is never done: we are always creating new content, and we introduce small but incremental additions and adjustments to the user interface on an almost weekly basis. We often have other publications and documentation in need of translations (or updated translations), so we welcome the involvement of newcomers who can help us maintain progress in making free and open data even more widely accessible around the world.

If you are interested in joining our volunteer community, please feel free to email us at communication@gbif.org. We'll discuss current priorities and arrange a time to orient you to the key tools and the most pressing tasks.

If you already have experience with CrowdIn (which our community first started using in 2014 to translate the interface for the GBIF IPT), you can simply request to join the CrowdIn project for your preferred language.

What recognition does GBIF give its volunteer translators?

In addition to direct attribution and acknowledgement of translators' work on individual pages of GBIF's various websites, we award Open Badges to all volunteers who contribute translations in a given calendar year.

We also expect to assess the impact of this community-led effort and use it as the basis of research, analysing web traffic and data access across different language groups before and after the availability of translations (Amayo, González-Varo & Sutherland 2016).

GBIF volunteer translators