Cellarion in Your Language — Help Translate It

Cellarion is translated by the people who use it

Cellarion's interface has always been English first. It doesn't have to stay that way — and increasingly it doesn't. The app ships today in Swedish, French and German, with Estonian newly under way. None of that was done by us in a spreadsheet. It was done by volunteers in a web editor.

That editor is Weblate, and our project there has just been approved for their free Libre plan. Translating Cellarion needs no Git, no pull requests, and no code. You sign in, you see an English phrase with the context it appears in, you type your language's version, you move on. Weblate handles everything after that — it opens the pull request, we review and merge it, and your words are in the next release.

The useful work isn't what you'd guess

Here's the thing most projects don't tell you, and it costs them volunteers: "we need translators" is wrong for half our languages.

French and German didn't start from an empty file. We drafted both in bulk, machine-first, precisely so that the human job would be the easier one — reviewing instead of typing. Every field is already filled. If you open French expecting blanks, you'll find none, conclude there's nothing to do, and leave.

There's plenty to do. It's just a different job:

• French and German — we need readers, not typists. Machine-drafted text is fluent and confidently wrong in the places that matter: wine terminology, the register we address you in, a word that was right in one context and wrong in the one it got reused in. In Weblate, search state:translated NOT state:approved — that's the queue. Read it, fix what's off, approve what's right.
• Swedish — we need a second pair of eyes. It's effectively complete and it's been read by almost nobody.
• Estonian, or a language we don't have at all — we need translators. Start anywhere. Your language appears in the app's language menu from about 10 % onwards, and until then you can preview your own work live by adding ?lng=et (or your code) to any Cellarion URL. Watching your translation land in the real interface is the fastest way to catch what a list of strings hides: the clipped button, the wrong tone, the term that needed a glossary entry.

What we've done to make it worth your time

A few things, deliberately:

• Nobody is silently switched into an unfinished language. Incomplete ones are labelled with their percentage, never auto-selected from browser settings, and never advertised to search engines. Untranslated text stays in English rather than showing you a broken half-translated screen.
• "Complete" and "checked by a human" are tracked separately. A language that's 100 % filled but unread says so, in the menu, in as many words. We'd rather be honest about that than let a percentage imply a review that never happened.
• There's a glossary, so drink window, rack, cellar and appellation mean one thing consistently instead of four things across four screens.
• Suggestion engines are available in the editor, so you're correcting a proposal rather than facing an empty box.
• You're credited — Weblate tracks who contributed what, and it's public.

Estonian arrived without being asked

Last week someone found the project on Weblate and started translating it into Estonian. No introduction, no issue, no permission needed — the first we knew of it was a pull request with 39 Estonian strings in it. Thank you, whoever you are.

That's the model working exactly as intended, and it's the invitation: you don't need to ask us, and you don't need to commit to finishing. A dozen strings is a real contribution. So is fixing one word that's been wrong for months.

Start here

hosted.weblate.org/engage/cellarion

If you'd like the detail first — guidelines, the glossary rules, plural forms, how a language graduates out of beta — that's all in TRANSLATING.md.

Cellarion is free, open-source and self-hostable, and every feature is free forever. Its translations work the same way: contributed by the people who use it, for everyone who comes after.