The easiest way to contribute to open source software

You don't have to be a coder to contribute to your favourite open source software.

I had the opportunity to initially work with the government via the company I was attached with, then in the government itself when I started working with a state government statutory board. And you would have known how important policies and written guidelines are for the government sector. They have all sorts of guidelines from top-level decision making strategies down to how to greet customers as a front-desk telephone operator.

Unsurprisingly, there's also a guideline created by the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit, simply called MAMPU, on creating a proper government website. That was one of my bibles when revamping the organisation's website and had it finally ranked in the top 2 for Sabah government websites, and top 20 of government sites in Malaysia.

To cut the story short, one of the requirements was that the website needs to be at least dual language, in Malay (BM) and English. At that particular time, I was disappointed that WordPress translation for BM was behind by more than a few version, and so I volunteered to translate the strings for WordPress core. Another problem arose, whereby I had to wait for the strings to be approved by the WordPress Malay translation team. After a bit of ping-ponging, I thankfully received the OK sign by the team and was made part of the approval editors for WordPress MY. It was a pretty desperate effort on my side because I really needed to use it for the government site and earn extra points.

Right now, we have more than 60 ms_MY contributors to WordPress Polyglots. Your name appears in the list automatically when any of your translated strings are approved. WordPress has a Glossary section which the ms_MY editors maintain and give guidelines on how to translate into Malay in a standardised manner. Malay-nised words are frowned upon and I personally find them annoying -- things like sofistikated, standard, efektif are not acceptable when you have the actual words like mutu, piawai, berkesan. So there's guidelines like that there.

If you want to get started and contribute, go check out your favourite open source software or volunteering translation jobs like the free Ubuntu OS and what Facebook offers. No technical skills required, just a strong command of both English and Malay is required.

As an aside, I'll let you know that I got my first job out of graduation as a Webmaster mainly because I got an A in my BM in SPM (okay, so my portfolio of websites contributed partly to me clinching the position, but really, when the first thing they do with your portfolio is skipping straight to my SPM certificate and noted happily about my BM result, one can't help but think).

LIKE WHAT YOU READ? Then check out my previous post: https://steemit.com/web/@webgrrrl/if-you-don-t-have-a-call-to-action-you-re-doing-it-wrong