FreeCAD is an inter­na­tion­al project fea­tur­ing con­trib­u­tors from dozens of coun­tries, and users around the globe. One way we work to improve the use­ful­ness of FreeCAD is by mak­ing it avail­able in many dif­fer­ent user-inter­face lan­guages using the crowd-sourced trans­la­tion plat­form CrowdIn.

The process begins with indi­vid­ual devel­op­ers mark­ing user-vis­i­ble strings in their code as need­ing trans­la­tion. Once or twice per month an extrac­tion process is run on FreeCAD’s source code to extract those strings and send them to the CrowdIn plat­form, at which point vol­un­teer trans­la­tors take over, exam­in­ing each string and its con­text and trans­lat­ing it into the many lan­guages FreeCAD sup­ports. In the next cycle, those new trans­la­tions are down­loaded from CrowdIn and incor­po­rat­ed into FreeCAD’s builds, and the process repeats with the new strings added in the meantime.

As of this writ­ing, FreeCAD has sup­port for over two dozen lan­guages: of course, in most cas­es there are still some miss­ing trans­la­tions! If you use FreeCAD in a lan­guage oth­er than Eng­lish and notice an untrans­lat­ed string, or one whose trans­la­tion you believe is incor­rect, con­sid­er join­ing the project at CrowdIn and help­ing us improve the user expe­ri­ence for oth­ers using your lan­guage. You can also post about the miss­ing string in either the FreeCAD Forum or in the GitHub repos­i­to­ry for trans­la­tions. With your help we can con­tin­ue to improve FreeCAD for users everywhere.