This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Follow us on Twitter for more information on our products.

Hej David – ‘adresse’ er kun med eet d på dansk :)

Parabéns pela novidade!

^^

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. :)

Basecamp in portuguese, great. I will use much more.

Hello,

I tried sending the following message to the group but it didn’t work. Here it goes:

Hello

I can do the Arabic translation. I’ve done plenty of software/website/tech localization including Twidroid and Mixero twitter clients, participating in the translation of Herdict Web for the Berkman Center of Internet and Security at Harvard Law School (check the list of key contributers), Psiphon, and TOR among others.

Please let me know what I need to do to start working on the translation.

Sincerely, Anas Qtiesh

I’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.

That’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.

I’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?

Hope spanish translation is a more international one, a lot of transtalations are made in spain with their local words.

Hey 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

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.

Frank, 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.

In the “Tolk” screenshot, “takes affect” should be “takes effect”.

@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,

Spanish, Portuguese (Brazillian) [...] Greek

Basecamp—the insolvent edition.

Good stuff. Congrats!

What Henrik said – your English needs translating. Even the string “address” says “affect”. ;-)

/me wants german translation! Any plans about that?

Yeah I need BC in German too. I am happy to help. Already sent an email…

Cool 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”

Basecamp 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.

Thank you for the Portuguese version! Our brazilian clients that dosent speak english are grateful.

I’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 :)

In the “Tolk” screenshot, “your” = “jeres” (or possibly “din”), and not “vores”.

Hey there,

what about German? Is it coming soon?

Thanks, Jan

warum kein Deutsch? vielleicht, nicht genug Kunden, oder?

deutsch 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.

Merci !

Why 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?

Hey 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.

I’ll help translate the free version, but if you want me to translate the other versions, you’ll need to purchase an upgrade :)

I’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.

Read a book as your site published some articles, some restricted web site on my publishing permission I would like sites do www.lovepowerman.net and www.lovepowerman.com Note that, especially in Turkey for the books to access or Buy difficult because it is very expensive, so this service in advance for your thanks a lot thank

Please help me get my second one on my website there All right enough coming two sindede some problems have this problem resolved for me to help me www.lovepowerman.net called on my phpbb I am All right, this site spam attacks, especially adult content to be added can not hold other site If you google my site on his blog but in this www.lovepowerman.com adense please help can not add

^ Hm, looks like it’s a good thing this blog has rel=nofollow links.

I look forward to seeing how you will support customers in 9 languages.

Translation 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.

great 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