Background and Need
We just launched the brand new Mifos X community app and it now needs to be translated into the local languages of our users. Our previous software was available in more than a dozen languages so we've got a lot to get translated:
- Spanish (Latin America)
Status colour Green title COMPLETE! - French (Franco-phonic Africa & MENA)
Status colour Green title COMPLETE! - Portuguese (Southern Africa & Brazil)
- Simplified Chinese (China)
- Bengali (India & Bangladesh)
- Kannada (India)
- Hindi (India)
- Arabic (MENA)
- Khmer (Cambodia)
- Russian (Central Asia)
- Swahili (East Africa)
Impact
Mifos X is a broadly applicable solution for financial institutions serving the base of the pyramid from any corner of the globe. However, the community app must first be localized into the local language for that country. Only once Mifos X is available in that language can it achieve it’s true value in scaling the reach of financial services to the poor.
Having the Mifos X community app readily available in these priority languages will dramatically broaden the footprint and potential impact of Mifos X to thousands more financial institutions across these regions.
Getting Started
All of our translations are handled through the Translatewiki.net website - they provide an easy-to-use online tool that also provides translations suggestions from Google and other translations that have been submitted. You should find it quite nice. The translations then get synced to our repository regularly.
Here are the links to get you started:
Create an account on translatewiki.net (TWN) by clicking the Create Account link in the upper righthand corner.
Once authenticated and logged in, browse to the Mifos Landing Page on TWN. http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translating:Mifos
Click Translate this Project and then click the desired language from Translate to link on the right, (click English and then select your desired language from the window that pops up)
You should now see a list of all the untranslated messages - click edit to submit a translation.
Read this page and watch this video to understand how Mifos is used on a day-to-day basis.
So you actually know what you're actually translating and what the software does, you should browse the live demo server of our Mifos X community app at https://demo.openmf.org/preview (user id: mifos | password: password). You might need to refresh your browser once or twice. From the homepage you can change your langauge using the blue button on the top right.
Other Resources
Glossary of Terms
Some knowledge of financial services vocabulary is helpful so please reference this glossary to understand what some of the terms mean and are referencing.
See https://mifosforge.jira.com/wiki/display/MIFOSX/Glossary and http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translating:Mifos#Mifos_Glossary and an older glossary: http://en.flossmanuals.net/mifos-user-manual/glossary/
Legacy Mifos Software
Another good point of reference is the previous software and the full translation into simplified-Chinese. You can browse that on our old demo server at http://demo.mifos.org/mifos using the user id: mifos and the password testmifos. To switch over to the desired interface, just click the Change Preferred Language link on the right hand corner and select your language from the drop-down menu.
Getting Help
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to email volunteer@mifos.org.
For general questions, you can also post and submit those on our community Q&A portal at http://mifos.cloud.answerhub.com/index.html
or through the Talk interface on TWN: http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translating_talk:Mifos