Ethereum.org serves as an educational website and gateway to Ethereum, often acting as people’s first introduction to Ethereum. It is where they find their initial wallet or dapp to use and serves as their primary resource for learning and advancing their knowledge. To ensure accessibility, we have been running the ethereum.org Translation program since July 2019, with the aim of making the website content available to the over 6 billion non-English speakers worldwide. By providing educational content and essential onboarding materials in as many languages as possible, we are striving to make learning about Ethereum and becoming an Ethereum user or developer as simple as possible for individuals irrespective of their language preference. Our efforts have resulted in a consistent increase in non-English pageviews as we add more translated content to the site, with visits to ethereum.org in languages other than English currently accounting for over one-quarter of all site traffic.
As an open-source website, ethereum.org invites anyone to contribute to its code, content, features, design, translations, or any other aspect of the site. If you are interested in contributing, you can explore different ways to get involved on our contributing pages.
To promote the importance of localizing content, onboard new contributors, incentivize translations in less active languages, and show appreciation to our community of contributors, we organized the first ethereum.org Translatathon in August this year. A Translatathon is a translation competition similar to a hackathon, requiring no coding skills or technical background. Bilingual individuals with basic knowledge about Ethereum can participate and help translate website content while learning about Ethereum. The Translatathon was organized over a 1-week translation period, where participants competed in two categories: Individuals and Teams. Machine translation was not allowed during the competition. After the completion of the translation period, participants underwent a 1-week evaluation and QA process to assess their translations. Winners were determined based on the total number of translated words multiplied by their multiplier score. Full details about the Translatathon can be found on the Translatathon page.
We received a total of 621 applications for the Translatathon, and during the translation period, 217 participants translated content into 56 different languages. The competition resulted in the translation of 1.47 million words, making August the most productive month for the Translation program so far. The amount of content translated during the 1-week period is approximately 50% of all the content translated through the program in 2022. The Translatathon successfully achieved its goals: raising awareness about the importance of localizing content, onboarding new contributors, incentivizing translations in less active languages, and giving back to our contributors. Over 70% of participants were eligible for prizes, and translations were done in languages previously unavailable on the website. The most active languages during the Translatathon were Turkish, Indonesian, and Spanish.
Winners were announced in both the Individuals and Teams categories, with honorable mention prizes given to several participants and teams. Additional prizes were awarded to top translators in each language and participants who translated over 100 words. Congratulations to all the winners, and thank you to all participants for their contributions!
Although the Translatathon has concluded, the ethereum.org translation community is constantly working on translating website content and improving accessibility for non-English speakers. Anyone is welcome to join the Translation program and get involved. Details about the program can be found on our website. Additionally, we will be organizing similar community engagement initiatives in the future, so stay tuned for updates! To remain up-to-date with ethereum.org or become a contributor, consider joining our community on Discord. We encourage you to join us in our ongoing efforts to enhance ethereum.org.
