Understanding what we do

Before starting a translation in a completely new language, you need to have a full understanding of what we do. If you're an Agora Speakers member and have attended or seen how our clubs work, then you already know enough. If now, however, please have a look first at the following two presentations for a thorough understanding of what we do:

• About Agora Speakers International
• About Agora's Educational Program
   

If at any point there are any questions, ask us at info at agoraspeakers.org

 

Guiding Principles

1. No "teaching" nor "teachers". All the people participating in Agora Speakers are volunteers. There are no teachers or experts in a club meeting. The meetings are practice meetings and not seminars nor lessons. As such, there cannot be any imperative language of the sort "you MUST do this" or similar unless you're translating an example of what not to do. Also, there can't be any language implying that some person is "teaching" others during a meeting. "Evaluation", for example, should not be translated as a formal scoring, but merely as an opinion that a member gives on someone else's performance.

2. Colloquial language. Language must be polite at all times, yet colloquial, simple, and easy to read. A person with a medium cultural level (high school) should be able to understand it.

3. Consistent style. Keep a consistent style throughout the whole material.

4. Preservation of structure and style. Document structure and paragraphs must be preserved (i.e.: one paragraph must be translated as one paragraph). Have in mind that the text in the wiki is used by some automated tools to generate presentations, banners, and even the Agora eBooks. Therefore it's imperative that you don't modify any existing structures or formatting styles.

5.Gender-neutral, within reason. Use gender-neutral terminology as long as it is:

    1) natural to the target language  AND

    2) preexisting and mainstream, AND

    3) not overboard AND

    4) doesn't make the text hard to read.

Do not fill the text with "his/her" or equivalents for the sake of political correctness. For example, the English usage of "they/their" to represent a singular, gender-neutral person is acceptable.

Usage of novelty or artificially introduced pronouns is not allowed.
 

6. Localization of names. All names and geographical references used in the examples must be localized.  For example, in the following paragraph

you should replace Carlos and Peter with local equivalents. There are no "protagonists" in the Guide, meaning that most examples like the above one are self-contained and independent of each other, so it's fine if in one example Peter is replaced by Pedro and in a different one by Joao.

It's more important to have something that makes sense locally than to preserve the exact original text. You can replace cultural references or similar ones with more appropriate ones.

Please note that the above refers to examples only, not to credited individuals that appear on photographs. Their names must be preserved without changes, not even transliterated.

7. Agora is never translated nor transliterated. The names "Agora", "Agora Speakers" and  "Agora Speakers International" are never translated nor transliterated (meaning - for languages using scripts other than Latin, they must always be written using the Latin script). For languages in which diacritics indicate the accent of the word (such as Spanish), Agora may be accentuated only when it appears alone, but not when it appears with "Agora Speakers" or "Agora Speakers International". (i.e.: Ágora is correct, Ágora Speakers International is not). The same applies to other recognizable brands - Dropbox, Youtube, Facebook, Whatsapp, etc.

8. Club officers. The club officer roles ("Vice President, Education") are translated, but not their abbreviations must appear both in the translated and untranslated form ("VPE").

9. Captions and links. If you translate a page, the image footers, table captions, and link texts must also be translated.

10.URLs. URL links need not be translated, leave them as they are.

11.Capitalization. Unless there are specific grammatical rules regarding capitalization (such as in German, where all nouns are capitalized), capitalization must be preserved as it is in the source text.

12.Encoding. All files must always be encoded as UTF-8.

13. Translation of Localization Strings. Some of the translations will be performed in text files that have the following structure:

key=value

for example:

system.error=Something didn't go as expected. Please retry the operation. If it keeps failing, drop us a note at info@agoraspeakers.org

In these cases:

• Leave what's to the left of the equal sign (=) unchanged
• Translate only what's to the right of the equal sign, replacing the existing English text.
• Keep the translation on one line (do not hit ENTER to break it).
• Keep the file format as UTF-8
• Do not translate anything after a  # (hash) symbol. These are comments and are ignored anyway. For example:
  

   

  #
  # Activity and Project Sections
  #

  You don't need to translate "Activity and Project Sections".
   
• Make sure you translate using a plain-text editor (such as Notepad, Notepad++, Atom, UltraEdit, etc.) that doesn't insert any kind of formatting or control characters. Definitely do not use Word or OpenOffice Writer.

For example,  the result of the above translation to Spanish would be:

system.error=Algo no funcionó como se  esperaba. Por favor, repite la operación. Si sigue sin funcionar, envíanos una nota a info@agoraspeakers.org

 

14. Foreign terms. Some parts of the wiki may include references to terms in other languages. For example:

The Sophists (from the Greek σοφιστής, sophistes, in turn from sophia - wisdom) 

In this case "Sophists" is a term, whereas "sophistes" and "sophia" are transliterations to English of the original Greek terms.  The translation needs to proeced as follows:

• The terms should be translated. (Sophists should be replaced by whatever that term is in the target language). If there's no such term, it must be transliterated.
• The transliterations of the original language - "sophistes" and "sophia" should be transliterated to the target language
• The spelling of the original terms  (σοφιστής,  in this case) should be left as they are (in this case, in Greek)

15. Informal pronouns. Some languages distinguish between formal and informal pronouns, especially in the second person (e.g.: "tu" vs "usted" in Spanish). If that is your case, use always the informal version.

16. Word Loans. Before using a word loan (even if it's an officially recognized one), make sure no native alternative exists that means the same thing.

17. Monetary Amounts. All amounts in dollars ($) should be kept in dollars (and not converted to any local form of currency)

18. Times and dates. Times, dates and days of the week should be translated to the local equivalent.