We’re delighted to announce the launch of our first wave of localization and translation work on PREreview.org!
For the past several months, we’ve been working with Luciana Lage, a collaborator of A Simple Translation in Portuguese, and with Noemí González-Rocha of A Simple Translation in Spanish, to translate PREreview.org into Brazilian Portuguese and Latin American Spanish. The work began last September with a set of community design sprints, and we have been working to include community members’ feedback into this project since then. We are now hosting this work, in part, on Crowdin, an online platform for organizing communities around the crowd-sourced translation of digital content.
In addition to our new translations, the team from A Simple Translation has helped us create a glossary to provide context for other community members who would like to help this effort, as well as a language inclusion statement regarding gender and formality that will help us make sure the way we translate PREreview.org into these languages is in alignment with our values and the localization and translation practices that best match them.
If you’d like to help us with the next steps of our work, please join our brand new volunteer localization and translation campaign on CrowdIn to help review existing translations and suggest new ones that best fit the language communities we serve!
We know it’s essential to work with community members on the localization aspects of this work because translation is not enough. Our goal is to make sure PREreview.org is well-adapted and contextualized for our Latin American community members. We want language choices made on PREreview.org to best reflect regional use and how our community members who publish and review in Latin American Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese use the site. PREreview is committed to developing tools and materials to support the work of community members, and we can't do that without their active participation in this process.
You can join us there on our PREreview Crowdin project to review and suggest improvements to our current Latin American Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese translations. Keep reading to learn more and to register for a demo call that will teach you how to use Crowdin to make localization and translation on PREreview.org better than ever!
What is Crowdin?
Crowdin is an AI-assisted localization and translation platform for digital content. As a small team, we’ve used Crowdin to help us quickly and efficiently generate translations for review. However, it’s vitally important to us that real human beings who use PREreview review, edit, and approve those translations to make sure that the language we use is not only accurate, but inclusive and just. That’s why we’ve worked with the team from A Simple Translation throughout this process, as well as our project glossary and language inclusion statements.
As Noemi González-Rocha notes:
“This work closely aligns with the popular slogan used for decades by advocates in the Disability Justice movement, ‘Nothing About Us Without Us,’ now being used widely in other social movements to highlight the need to closely involve the communities most impacted by the inequalities we seek to address. This principle of participation goes beyond making members of these communities mere participants, to have them lead the work. In this context, who is better positioned to point out linguistic preferences in your own region of the world, so the resources we offer are meaningful, than you who call it home? Of course, because the community is diverse and every individual identity faces different social intersections, it’s important to engage in an inclusive way.”
That’s also why we’re beginning this new journey with community members to help us review work done so far and sustain and evolve our efforts to localize and translate the site into more languages in the future. Crowdin allows for this kind of human, crowd-sourced teamwork, which is another reason we opted to try out this platform.
How do I help?
Option 1: Using our translation site
Visit https://translate.prereview.org/.
If you’ve used Crowdin before, you can log in to your existing account. If not, you can sign up for a free account. You can use your email address, or you can sign up using an existing account on Google or other services.
Once you’ve signed in to your account, you can select which language you would like to see PREreview in. You’ll then see a version of the PREreview site in that language.
You’ll see that the text on the page is surrounded by boxes. If you hover over a piece of text, you’ll see a pencil icon appear in the top-left corner.
Clicking the pencil icon will bring up Crowdin’s editor for that piece of text. You can suggest or edit a translation, up-vote or down-vote existing translations.
It’s also connected to our glossary:
Option 2: Using Crowdin’s site
You can also visit the PREreview project on Crowdin.
If you click a the language you’ll see a list of parts of PREreview that are translated:
If you click on one of these parts, you’ll be prompted to sign up for/in to a Crowdin account. Once you’ve signed in, you’ll see Crowdin’s editor showing you all the translations in this group.
The editor has various ways of viewing the translations. For example, you can select the "Comfortable" option like this:
The "Comfortable" option shows more details about the text, where you can suggest or edit the translation, and up-vote or down-vote existing translations.
How can I learn more?
To learn more about how to use Crowdin to improve PREreview’s localization and translation work, please join us for one or two demo calls we are holding in June!
The first call will be in Portuguese and English, and the second will be in Spanish and English. Both calls will have the same content, so you only need to join the call that best matches your expertise and interest in helping to localize and translate PREreview.org. We invite you to join the one that best fits your language knowledge and regional experience.
Register here:
- Call 1, Portuguese-English - Tuesday, 10 June 2025, 8 AM PT / 9 AM CST / 10 AM COT / 11 AM ET / 12 PM BRT / 3 PM UTC (find your local time here)
- Call 2, Spanish -English - Wednesday, 11 June 2025, 8 AM PT / 9 AM CST / 10 AM COT / 11 AM ET / 12 PM BRT / 3 PM UTC (find your local time here)
We’re delighted to continue this work and so grateful for volunteers like you who want to help us in our efforts to provide the most inclusive open, preprint peer review platform available. We hope you can join us!
About the author(s)
Chad Sansing lives and works in central Virginia. When he’s not gaming, reading, walking, or spending time with family, you can find him working on PREreview.org alongside trusty officemate and chief canine officer, Sleepy the Dog.
Chris Wilkinson is based just outside of Cambridge, UK. He spends his days building the technology behind PREreview.org, sketching, talking about sketching, watching sketching videos, and playing Minecraft and Lego with his kids. He’s occasionally joined by Carrot the Cat, though mostly when he wants to be let outside.
