Community Translation

Open-source and community-driven projects often want help from their users to reach more languages, but inviting every willing volunteer as a project member does not scale. Each member takes up a paid seat, gains access to project internals, and can change translations directly. You want the reach of a crowd without handing out that level of access.

Community Translation solves this. Make a project public and anyone signed in can find it, open a limited view, and propose translation suggestions or leave comments. They never become members, never take a paid seat, and can never overwrite your existing translations. You stay in control and accept only the suggestions you want.

Make a project public

Publishing a project is what turns on community translation for it. Only the organization owner (or a server administrator on self-hosted instances) can change this, because it exposes the project's translations to anyone with an account.

Go to Project settings > Advanced and find the Public project section. Turn on Make this project public.

Tolgee asks you to confirm, because publishing changes who can reach the project. When you make a project public, anyone signed in will be able to find it on the public projects page and propose suggestions. They will not become members and cannot edit existing translations.

If you can't see the Public project section or the switch is disabled, you are not the organization owner. Ask an owner to publish the project for you.

What community members can do

When a project is public, every signed-in user gets a community permission on it. This permission is a limited subset of the View role plus the ability to suggest and comment. A community member can

• View translations and screenshots in all languages
• View the project activity
• Propose translation suggestions
• Comment on translations, for example to flag a wrong or machine-generated translation

The community permission never lets anyone

• Overwrite an existing translation or change its state (translated or reviewed)
• Add or remove languages
• See the project members or their email addresses
• Change project settings

Community members are not project members. They do not appear in your members list, they do not use a paid seat, and publishing a project never changes your billing. To give someone the ability to edit translations directly, invite them as a member instead.

info

The community permission applies only to signed-in users. Visitors who are not logged in can browse the public projects page but must log in before they can open a project or suggest anything.

How contributors find your project

Public projects are listed on the community translations page at /public-projects. Anyone can open this page, even without an account, browse the projects, and search for one to help with.

Visitors who are not signed in see Log in and Sign up buttons in the top bar. Opening a project or proposing a suggestion requires an account, so a new contributor registers or logs in first, then opens your project in the limited community view.

Each row shows the project name with an outlined public badge and the owning organization, along with the key count, translation-state bar, and languages, so a contributor can pick a project and a language that needs work at a glance.

Review community suggestions

Community members propose changes as suggestions, never as direct edits, so nothing they submit goes live until you accept it. Open the translation in the editor and review the incoming suggestions the same way you review any other suggestion.

When a suggestion is good, you have two ways to accept it. Accept only promotes that suggestion to the live translation and leaves the other suggestions open, which is useful when you want to keep comparing alternatives. Accept and decline others promotes the suggestion and dismisses the competing ones in a single step.

For the full suggestion workflow, including how to enable direct suggestions for your own members, read Translation Suggestions.

Make a project private again

To stop accepting community translations, go back to Project settings > Advanced and turn off Make this project public. Tolgee confirms the change, because the community loses access immediately.

Once the project is private, it is no longer listed on the public projects page and community members can no longer open it. Members you invited directly keep their access and everything they contributed stays in place. Nothing about the project view changes for your members, the community simply loses the permission to reach it.