Update 10 June 2019

We have migrated the pfSense® translations from zanata.org to zanata.netgate.com.

You can view our May 29, 2019 post for all of the details on how to sign up and begin translating. We’re looking for both translators and reviewers.

We appreciate all of the support to extend Netgate documentation into other languages, and we look forward to continually improving upon it.

In the 1920s, when Coca-Cola was first translated phonetically into Chinese, the resultant phrase meant “bite the wax tadpole”.  Coke finally marketed its product under an alternate phrase, which sounded less like “Coca-Cola” but carried the more appetizing meaning “can mouth, can happy.” Pepsi too had problems with Chinese when their slogan “Come Alive with the Pepsi Generation” was translated for a Taiwanese billboard as “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.” KFC (formerly known as Kentucky Fried Chicken) found that its “Finger-Lickin’ Good” slogan was translated into Chinese as the admonition “Eat Your Fingers Off.”

The point is, translations are serious work.

A few months ago we announced the use of the Zanata project to assist in the translation of the pfSense® UI into other languages. Since then, volunteers have begun to translate pfSense into more languages than we imagined, and several translations have already been completed. We would like to sincerely thank everyone who has contributed so far!

Since we value these translations, we want to reward to those who substantially contribute to our translation effort.  To do this, we are announcing a new program designed to both motivate and reward those who participate. We will be rewarding every translator who contributes significantly to a language with pfSense Gold subscriptions and Netgate SG-1000 microFirewalls. This includes the people who have contributed prior to this blog post.

Those who translate 10% or more of a given language will be rewarded with a one year subscription to pfSense Gold.  10% is about 700 phrases, so there is a substantial, but not impossible amount of work required. cmenghi, kik3san, niofeudo, brujonic and gersonofstone89 have already reached this level, and we will be contacting them soon.

Those who translate 50% or more of a given language will receive a custom-etched Netgate SG-1000 microFirewall.  Our Chinese(Simple, China) and Chinese (Taiwan) translators, fxn2010 and derliang have achieved this level.

Program rules:

  • No cheating - don’t copy / paste from an already translated language
  • Translations are subject to confirmation by the language reviewer/admin
  • We accept both .po files created outside of Zanata, and translations directly in Zanata
  • One reward per language per translator
  • Our judgement on these rules is final

To find out more about Zanata and how to sign up for pfSense translations, please read our original post on this subject.

Mahalo nui loa for your kokua.