This activity is written for someone who has already logged into Transifex and joined / accepted to the publiclab.org project (see this activity).

(1.) Browse to our main project page on Transifex by either clicking the upperleft hand logo of Transifex or this direct URL: https://www.transifex.com/publiclab/publiclaborg/dashboard/

The dashboard shows how many total words there are to translate and how many collaborators there are:

(2.) In the left sidebar, click languages to see how many languages are currently underway. https://www.transifex.com/publiclab/publiclaborg/languages/. Shown here are German and Spanish:

(3.) In the left sidebar, click Resources. https://www.transifex.com/publiclab/publiclaborg/content/. Notice that what this is showing you is a list of individual files with strange names, 71 of them at time of writing this instruction:

--> Let's take a minute to go over why there are so many awkwardly named files in a giant list. Each bit of text that is constant on the Public Lab website (think of the top menu bars, the footer, the sidebar, and any posting forms), is stored in one of these little files. Basically, anything except the content that people post or comment. PS if you were wondering, the file extension `.yml` is pronounced "yamel" as in "rhymes with camel" and if you want any more information about it, check out its wikipedia page.

--> Notice that each row is categorized by what part of the site it belongs to. It might be a good idea to choose a part of the website to translate in one shot. PS I created these, so if you feel something is mis-categorized let me know and i'll change it:

* comments (2)
* dashboard (9)
* home (6)
* subscriptions (1)
* alerts (1)
* footer (1)
* header (1)
* signup-quiz (1)
* research-notes (10)
* questions (1)
* date&time (1)
* sidebar (8)
* tags (7)
* talk-page (1)
* profiles (15)
* wiki (6)

--> Also notice that each line says how many words are in each one, this information can help you decide what to work on.

(4.) Click on the first file "comments_edit_en.yml".
You will see progress bars for each language.
Click the big blue button "Translate" to go into the web interface:

(5.) The first time you click on the web interface, it will offer Public Lab's Contributors License Agreement, which is nearly the same as the license we agree to when we sign up for publiclab.org/signup (scroll to bottom to read), but adjusted so that it doesn't say hardware. Click "I Agree":

(6.) The web editor invites you to choose your language, the URL is https://www.transifex.com/publiclab/publiclaborg/translate/; clicking in the box will show you the language you have been invited to translate. Choose it and see the URL shift to https://www.transifex.com/publiclab/publiclaborg/translate/#es

(7.) Next, it invites you to choose a resource (meaning one of the little files with a little bit of text) to translate -- click the first one:

(8.) At this point, we see the editor interface itself:
On the left, each word or phrase is separated out onto its on line.
On the right, there's a place to type in your translation.

In this example, Jeff (JYWARREN on transifex and @warren here) has already translated a couple words:

In this example, Pablo (NUMEROTECA on transifex and @pablo here) has translated a phrase:

(9.) Now click on a row that doesn't have a suggestion yet, for instance at time of writing this we can use line 5 which is the word "Preview". Notice on the right how it invites you to "Type your suggestions here" -- this is where you can write in your own translations:

(10.) Immediately below the box you can type in is a Suggestion area. This will occasionally be very useful, a benefit of using a platform that is learning from many other people doing translations. To accept a suggestion, click the tiny icon on the far right that sort of resembles two pieces of paper. This will cause the suggestion text to appear in the box above, then you can click the blue "Save" button to actually submit this contribution.

(11.) At this point you can continue typing in suggestions and saving them, or navigating back to the list of all the files and choosing another one to see if there's anything you can translate.

(12.) This is the end of this activity, look out for the next one on reviewing translations that people have contributed!