Translating Unicode® Material

Although its working language is English, the Unicode Consortium strives to reach as many people and organizations in as many countries as possible around the world. One way of doing that is by encouraging the translation of Unicode material into languages other than English.

This page guides volunteers who wish to contribute a translation of any Unicode material they deem interesting to their local audiences.

1. Contact us

Use the contact form to tell us which page you plan on translating. This will allow us to:

• Avoid duplication, in case the page has been or is currently being translated by someone else.
• Send you the correct template of the page you intend to translate.

2. Disclaimer and copyright boilerplate

Any translation will need to bear the following prominent disclaimer, in the target language:

“This page is a translation and may contain errors or inconsistencies. In case of any discrepancy, the original English text [add original English title and link to original English page here] should be considered authoritative. Copyright © 1991-20xx Unicode, Inc. All rights reserved.”

3. Translation quality control

Raw machine translation is not an acceptable level of quality for Unicode translations. Negative feedback from the Unicode community indicating that a translation is of poor quality may result in the permanent removal of the link to the translation.

All links within a translation are expected to be valid and the translation page must pass markup and CSS validation to assure interoperability and syntactic validity. (Validation tools are at http://validator.w3.org/).

4. Warnings

Some of the documents on the Unicode website are stable while others change more often. Before contributing a translation, people should consider how often the page changes and how committed they are to updating their translation accordingly.

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