Localization Administrators’ Guide

So you’re a volunteer translator, helping bring footbag.org’s features and information to a broader audience. Thank you for helping out. Please find detailed instructions below to help you with this thankless task, and to help you avoid common mistakes. This documentation is for average users — you don’t have to be very knowledgeable about computers to be able to follow these instructions. However, we do expect a certain level of fluency in English and in general web usage to be able to understand the core concepts.
Underlying Concepts

(These are raw notes, I will clean this up soon.)

Footbag.org’s native language is English. This means:

all translations must go from English to the local language of the translator;
all translateable “user-generated content” (see below) must be authored in English before being translated;
whenever a translation is out of date or not available, English will always be used by default.

Footbag.org is composed of three types of content as applies to translation:

Core User Experience Elements – these are everything from the “chrome” of a given application (e.g., headers, footers, page titles, menu options, and instructions) to computer-generated text (e.g., automated confirmation e-mails, forms, error messages, etc.).
User-Generated Content – this is content that is actually entered by users of footbag.org (usually admins within a specific domain). For example, the “frequently-asked questions” section can be translated, as can the entire IFC Rule Book. However, there are quite a lot of end-user-generated sections (such as event and club listings, user profiles, etc.) that are not (currently) translateable. This is because for the most part, there is not much value in offering translations. Users are allowed to type club and profile data in their native language in that case.
Third-Party Software – this is mostly outside the scope of our translation/localization system and cannot be translated; however, there may be some specific chrome (similar to core user experience elements) that “wraps” the third-party software that is also translateable. For example, this reference section (built using MediaWiki), is not translateable using this system — however, you will notice that the title of the reference section itself is can in fact be translated. Similarly, the forum has some basic “chrome” that is translateable where it is displayed on footbag.org, but the content and detailed controls within the forum application do not use this system. (We recommend against trying to translate the third-party software, as we reserve the right to change to a new provider at some point in the future.)

Unfortunately, not all content can be translated.

You job as a translator is to “localize” the text, where applicable… more coming here…

Also talk about Unicode (which is not yet here but coming soon).
Translating/Localizing Core Features:

…this is where we will list URLs to real translation stuff (editrealm)…
Translating/Localizing User-Generated Content:

…this is where we enumerate each UGC feature .. maybe in a separate page…

…more coming here…