When I joined Magento over a year ago I took stock of where we were collaborating with the community to advance the Magento platform. One area in need of improvement was the translation tool. Magento installations serve merchants and their customers in dozens of languages, and for a long time we shipped Magento 1 with language packs for some of the popular languages. We also provided a tool for community-created translations, some of which were completed and delivered via Magento Connect. That said, there was no substantial process or curation involved in this tool, and it didn't facilitate interaction among each language's translators. Because the experience was substandard we removed access to this tool almost a year ago and began the search for a replacement.
I'm delighted to report that we have found a replacement tool which will facilitate community-sourced translations, and we are now ready to accept contributions! The steps to become a translation contributor are below:
Why are we going with a crowdsourced translation tool?
We are excited as always to incorporate the effort and knowledge of our community to help make Magento better for merchants and consumers!
Huge thanks to Piotr Kaminski for his efforts in getting this project ready to go.