Contributing to the translated content of MDN Web Docs

🎉 First of all, thanks for taking the time to contribute to MDN Web Docs’ translated content! 🎉

The following is a set of guidelines for contributing to the translated content of MDN Web Docs, which is hosted within the MDN Organization on GitHub.

Guidelines for peers can be found here.

Locales

Before we go any further, you should be aware that we are only accepting updates to active locales — this means locales that have active community maintenance teams in place to review PRs, fix issues, make updates, etc. Currently the list of active locales is:

• fr
• ja
• ko
• pt-BR
• ru
• zh (zh-CN and zh-TW)
• es

If you want to just find a task and jump in, search by the labels l10n-fr, l10n-ja, l10n-ko, l10n-pt-br, l10n-ru, l10n-zh and l10n-es in this repo’s issues list, or the main content repo issues

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Code of Conduct

Everyone participating in this project is expected to follow our Code of Conduct.

License

When contributing to the content you agree to license your contributions according to our license.

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Making contributions

A good place to learn about general guidelines for contributing to MDN Web Docs is the Guidelines document. For example, you can find out more about MDN's writing-style guidelines via the Writing style guide.

Setting up to edit

This repo has exactly the same folder structure, concepts, and commands available to it as the content repo, which holds all of MDN's English content. The main difference is in the setup you need to do before you can start editing. It is mostly the same, but there is a little bit more to consider.

To begin with, get the basic required tooling set up, as described in the content repo Setup section.

Now you need to fork and clone both the content repo and the translated-content repo (this repo).

Content repo setup

1. Once the above is done, cd into the content repo.

2. Run the command yarn install to fetch the latest packages and get the local MDN testing environment set up. It is also recommended that you run yarn install before every update you do to the source, to make sure you have the latest packages.

3. Next, create an environment variable called CONTENT_TRANSLATED_ROOT containing the path to the translated-content repo’s files directory. You could do this for a single session like so:

   export CONTENT_TRANSLATED_ROOT=/path/to/translated-content/files

   But you’ll have to newly-set this every time you open up a new terminal window. Instead, you could put the environment variable setting in an .env file in the root of your content repo. This is most easily done using the following command:

   echo CONTENT_TRANSLATED_ROOT=/path/to/translated-content/files >> .env

   (the .env file will be created for you if it does not already exist.)

4. Now you’ve got this set up, enter the command yarn start to begin the local testing server running at localhost:5042.

Working in the translated-content repo

Over in the translated-content repo, decide what change you want to make, and then:

1. Create a new branch to make your changes in.

2. Switch to your new branch and make the changes you want to make. You can keep going back to localhost:5042/<your_locale> (e.g. localhost:5042/fr for French) to test your changes and make sure the content looks how you want it to look.

3. When you are satisfied with your changes, create a pull request and one of our review teams will review it.

4. Once the pull request has been merged, the edition may take up to 48 hours (daily build and CDN caches). To see if your change has been deployed, you can check on What's Deployed.

For more info on editing this repo

For more information, we’d like to suggest that you go to the content repo and read its README file, particularly to learn about fundamental concepts, pull request etiquette, and common actions such as adding, moving, or deleting documents.