About the No Trace Project

The No Trace Project is a "collection of tools to help anarchists and other rebels understand the capabilities of their enemies, undermine surveillance efforts, and ultimately act without getting caught". It currently consists of:

• The Resources, a searchable database of zines, texts and other media dealing with surveillance and operational security.
• The Threat Library, a threat modeling tool for anarchists.
• Ears and Eyes, a searchable database of cases of physical surveillance devices hidden by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Internationalism is important for us and we intend to translate our tools to as many languages as possible. Friendly people from Anarchy Planet provide us with this Weblate platform to coordinate our translation efforts. To help us translate our tools to new languages or improve our current translations, just create an account on the platform (you'll need an email address), contact us at <notrace@autistici.org> so we approve your account, and you're good to go!

The base language of our projects is English, which means that we write the original text in English, which anyone can then translate to other languages. Weblate organizes the text into items called "strings", which just means a grouping of words or characters.

In the next sections you will find a few tips and guidelines that should be followed when translating.

Required language skills

In order to achieve good quality translations and make our project more accessible to non-English readers, translators should have some knowledge of both English and the language into which they are translating. We ask that you:

• Have a good understanding of English.
• Have a professional or near-professional level of proficiency in the language you are translating into (if you are a native speaker of that language, it should be fine!).

Weblate components

On Weblate, our website content is split in several components that match corresponding parts of our website. Specifically:

• The core component matches the website home page.
• The resources and resources.contribute components match the Resources.
• The threats, threats.about, threats.contribute, and threats.tutorial components match the Threat Library.
• The earsandeyes, earsandeyes.about, and earsandeyes.contribute components match Ears and Eyes.

Once all the components that match a part of the website get fully translated in a language, notify us at <notrace@autistici.org> and we'll enable the language for the part of the website in question.

The glossary component is a special component that doesn't match anything on our website (see the "Glossary" section below for more information).

How to translate...

Special formatting

When translating, you may notice that some strings contain special formatting, which should be kept in the translated strings. Such special formatting include:

• Text surrounded by * characters: this indicates that the text is rendered in italic or bold. If some text is surrounded by such characters in an original English string, it must also be the case in the translated string.
• Links formatted as [link text](https://example.com): the link text must be translated but the URL (the part between parenthesis) must stay the same.
• Footnotes formatted as [^footnote text]: if the footnote text is a URL it must stay the same, otherwise it must be translated.

Additionally, any line breaks in an original string should be kept in the translated string.

"No Trace Project"

The name of the project, "No Trace Project", should not be translated. It should be "No Trace Project" in all languages.

"Resources", "Threat Library", and "Ears and Eyes"

For the names of the three parts of the website, "Resources", "Threat Library", and "Ears and Eyes", you have the choice to translate them or keep them in English:

• If a short, satisfying translation exists in the target language, use this translation. For example, in French "Resources" is translated to "Ressources" because it is short and satisfying.
• If no short, satisfying translation exists in the target language, use the English version. For example, in French "Ears and Eyes" is hard to translate well, so the English version is used.

Consistency is important: once a decision has been made on how to translate one of these names in a target language, this decision should be respected everywhere. To make this easier, the name can be translated in the glossary (see the "Glossary" section below for more information).

Gender neutrality

Compared to many other languages, English is a rather gender-neutral language. This means that sometimes, an original English string will mention a person or category of persons without mentioning their gender, but a traditional translation of the string in another language would normally mention their gender. In such cases, we ask that you try to find a gender-neutral translation that works in the language you're translating to: whether you mention several genders, or none at all, or alternate between genders, or whatever you prefer.

Screenshots

Some strings are accompanied by screenshots. The purpose of screenshots is to show you the context in which a string is used, to help you translate it. If a string has screenshots attached to it, you can find them in the right sidebar when translating the string (or below the translation panel if you're on mobile) under "String information" and "Screenshot context".

Glossary

The glossary component is a special Weblate component that does not match any part of our website. Instead, its purpose is to codify how certain recurring terms should be translated so that they are always translated the same way throughout the project. When you translate a string, if the string contains one or more glossary terms, those terms are highlighted in the string and their glossary translations can be found or changed in the right sidebar (or below the translation panel if you're on mobile) under "Glossary".

The glossary can be translated either all at once or as you stumble upon glossary terms while doing other translations. If there is a recurring term you'd like to see added to the glossary, contact us at <notrace@autistici.org>.