This page contains guidelines for localization at GitLab. This page is maintained by the Global Content team.
GitLab is a global company that does business around the world. In order to best serve our global customers, we localize our content and campaigns into native languages.
Our current localization capablities are limited due to resources and bandwidth. Currently, we are focused on translating content that aligns to our P0 countries. Additionally, we are enabling our field marketing teams to get lighweight translations that don't require internal development or design resources.
To ensure translated content makes contextual and technical sense, we have internal native language speakers review the content. At the moment, our internal reviewers are volunteers. We completely appreciate that this task is on top of your day job and will continue to respect that. Below are some expectations, as we will sometimes have hard deadlines to try to hit.
Internal reviewers are expected to review content for accuracy and quality and identify small mistakes made by the translator. Internal reviewers are not expected to copyedit or rewrite documents. However, reviewers may want provide preferred translations during the review process and they are welcome to do so. If the quailty of a translated document is poor and needs to be written, the reviewer should stop reading and let the requestor know that the translation is not usable and provide a reason why. The requestor should provide this feedback to the translator.
Guidelines for job requesters
Guidelines for reviewers
Timeframe guideline for reviewers
#mktgops
and tag the job requester.Language | Reviewers |
---|---|
French | @k33g |
German | @skraft |
For some languages, a review step is built within the translation process in Smartling. We have internal reviewers that are trained on Smartling to review and send back to the translators if there are any issues.
Languages that the Smartling step is enabled for:
Internal reviewers for these languages that will review via Smartling:
Language | Reviewers |
---|---|
German | @KSetschin, @JulianBede, @jkunzmann, @ddornseiff, @mbrandner1 |
Russian | @KSetschin, @V_Rusin, @dzalbo, @igor.drozdov |
Japanese | @toshitakaito, @yuki_murakami, @Tea_Tatsuki, @mueda1, @skawaguchi1, @Yohanesses |
Korean | @taehohyun, @iyoo, @kko4, @Yohanesses |
French | @pgascouvaillancourt |
Portuguese (Brazilian) | @lvieiradossantos, @ricardoamarilla, @lvieiradossantos |
Spanish (LATAM) | @jaime, @ricardoamarilla, @lvieiradossantos |
Italian | @Valelomby @agulina |
Please follow the below process for requesting a review but please do so at the same time of opening the Smartling job:
Annually we prioritize countries that we believe offer the most opportunity for GitLab. A listing of those countries and our expected level of investment are tracked in an internal document called: Priority Country Analysis.
Our current localization capabilities are limited due to resources and bandwidth. Currently, we are focused on translating content that aligns to our integrated campaign strategy. Additionally, we are enabling our field marketing teams to get lightweight translations that don't require internal development or design resources.
Vendor | Capabilities | Access |
---|---|---|
Rev | English language transcriptions, foreign language subtitles | Open an access request issue |
Smartling | Localization platform | Open an access request issue |
Localized campaigns currently follow the integrated campaign process. The Integrated Marketing team is responsible for content localization for integrated campaigns. Content marketers are responsible for campaigns that fall within their subject area domain:
Use Case | DRI |
---|---|
VCC | TBD |
CI | TBD |
DevSecOps | TBD |
Simplify DevOps/DevOps platform | TBD |
GitOps | TBD |
CD | TBD |
Agile | TBD |
Cloud Native | TBD |
If an asset has been designed using Smartling's DTP service, be sure to upload the localized design files to the translations folder for our internal design team.
The following language preference segmentations are available in Marketo:
All translated pages live in a sub-folder dedicated to a specific language. These sub-folders use [ISO 639-1 codes] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes). For example, German pages live in the /de/
sub-folder.
Search engines use the hreflang
tag to determine a canonical version for translated pages. We'll use hreflang
on our translated pages.
hreflang
tags start with declaration <link rel="alternate"
, adds URL href={{url}}
, and ends with hreflang={{language ISO}}
Example of a hreflang tag for a URL translated to German.
<link rel="alternate" href="https://about.gitlab.com/de/warum/nutze-continuous-integration-fuer-schnelleres-bauen-und-testen/" hreflang="de" />
The canonical version of our site will the United States English version on about.gitlab.com
. We need to add all versions of a page under the page title and link to each one with the appropriate language noted. Google provides this example:
<head>
<title>Widgets, Inc</title>
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb"
href="http://en-gb.example.com/page.html" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us"
href="http://en-us.example.com/page.html" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en"
href="http://en.example.com/page.html" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de"
href="http://de.example.com/page.html" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default"
href="http://www.example.com/" />
</head>
It's important to note we need to declare the default page from our repository as the canonical version to avoid penalities across Google properties.
Aleyda Solis maintains a great tool to build hreflang
tags we can use for reference as well.
Language | Localized Website | Status |
---|---|---|
French | https://about.gitlab.com/fr-fr/ | Live |
Japanese | https://about.gitlab.com/ja-jp/ | Live |
German | https://about.gitlab.com/de-de/ | Live |
Korean | https://about.gitlab.com/ko-kr/ | In progress |
Italian | https://about.gitlab.com/it-it/ | In progress |
Portugese | https://about.gitlab.com/pt-br/ | In progress |
Spanish | https://about.gitlab.com/es-es/ | In progress |
Russian | https://about.gitlab.com/ru-ru/ | In progress |