Translating with Pootle/Setting up your account
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The next two subsections explain how to properly register with Pootle. If you already have an account that lets you translate or make suggestions, skip to section 2, "Making translations and suggestions." (In this document, we italicize things to look for, like button names or the words used in a link, and we mark page names in bold.)
Creating an account
Before you can contribute translations or suggestions, you need to create an account. Go to http://translate.creativecommons.org and click the Log in link in the upper right-hand corner. Enter your desired username and password and click Register. This will take you to the full registration page, which will ask you for your password again, your full name, and your email address. Click Register once more, and Pootle will send an activation code to the email address you specified. Follow the link to the activation page, and copy your activation code into the Activation Code box. Click Activate Account, and your account is now activated.
Now you can log in by clicking the Log in button in the upper-right corner.
Your user page
Every time you log in, you will be taken to your user page:
If you would like to translate a particular language or project, you need to let us know by choosing it in your user preferences. You must do this before we can grant you permissions to save and commit your work.
To do that, look in the Quick Links column on the left side of your "My Account" page. Because you have nothing specified yet, Pootle tells you to choose your languages and projects. This takes you to the same place a the Change options link. This takes you to the Options page.
There are three sections to this page, each with their own separate Save changes buttons. This is a little counter-intuitive.
The Personal Details section lets you change information related to how you log in to Pootle. If you make any changes, be sure to hit Save changes and ensure they appear again after the page reloads.
The Translation Interface Configuration section is worth a look. We urge you to configure an alternative source language. Pootle generally shows you the English text when doing translations; the language you choose here as an alternative source will appear underneath the English. This can be very useful if you are, for example, localizing Spanish into Colombian Spanish, or if you are fluent in two languages. Again, if you make changes, be sure to Save changes.
The Projects and languages configuration section is crucial.
Select all the projects you are interested in. (You can choose more than one by pressing and holding Ctrl on the keyboard and clicking on many, or by just dragging the mouse over the ones you want to select.) We suggest choosing all of our projects. Do the same to select the languages you wish to translate. Note that we cannot grant you special privileges on a language until you have selected it here.
(Languages currently need to be assigned to projects by server administrators. If you are interested in translating a project into a new language, or adding a completely new language, email the project you're interested in and the language to webmaster@creativecommons.org.)
