Translating Zettlr into Spanish

As a personal project, I want to translate the documentation of this software to make the manual available into Spanish. Here my notes about this experience.

Zettlr: a Markdown editor

Some years ago I started to use Zettlr as my default Markdown editor. To contribute with its development I want to help with the translation of this manual, to see if this enhance the community of Spanish speakers.

The Github repository

To write this translations collaboratively, the Zettlr community use a repository on Github. In their instructions says you need to clone the repository (which I did and now it's available here) and there I started the Spanish version of the Docs.

My favourite software configuration management (SCM) it's Fossil, you can find it in my book Estudio Crews en Detalle or Fundación Conector's website. I was struggling a little bit with the codes to clone a repository, add documents and sent my pull request to merge the existing files with those I added in Spanish.

Translating Zettlr from Zettlr

I used this markdown editor to translate it. I really liked to read every single section and then try it to see how does it work. I have to confess that I couldn't customise templates, that means write something in markdown, and export it into a a specific format (PDF for example) with fixed templates like this one using EB Garamond to get capital letters following a style of a XVI century book. I have no idea how to do that from Zettlr, but at least I can do it directly from Pandoc.

I wanted to do this text using inclusive language because in Spanish you can use a masculine or femenine version of certain sentences, and with a decolonial perspective. For me was very strange that this symbol "$" was named "dollars" instead of "pesos" for example, that was a perspective from the Global north in my humble opinion. I used in general a Spanish from Bogota, that can be different for other Spanish speakers for Chile, Argentina or Mexico but give us a sense of the richness of our language.

Sending my version

At the end I made my pull request to include Spanish to the Zettlr documentation manual. I saw a message saying that my version was Able to merge. Now I just have to wait the approval and see it online.

And here it is!

Now you can read Zettlr Docs in Spanish

Some thanks from the people

I didn't expect any comment regarding to the translation, but some people drop a message and that was very nice, or "bacano" as we say in Bogotá. Even from the official Zettlr account on Twitter was mentioned.

Big news! @hiperterminal has taken on themselves the task to translate the full documentation (!) to Spanish, and it's now live! Thanks so much for all your work! 🎉 https://docs.zettlr.com/es/hanks so much for all your work! 🎉 https://docs.zettlr.com/es/

@zettlr on December 28th, 2021

Here the message on Discord.

And here some messages on Telegram in Spanish.