I want to contribute and translate arc42 to another languages

That’s good news, you’re welcome!

Some prerequisites:

  1. You should have some experience with git, especially how to clone a repository, create a branch and a pull-request on Github.
  2. You should be familiar with either the German (DE) or English (EN) versions of the template, as these are the two languages that will have the most current versions and bugfixes (the core maintainers take care for both EN and DE).
  3. You should be a little familiar with text-based markup languages, like Markdown or Asciidoc, as the translation will require you to create AsciiDoc files.

Our proposed way of translating the template goes as follows:

  1. Create your own fork of the official arc42-template repository from Github.
  2. Clone your fork from Github to your local disk. That creates a directory arc42-template.
  3. Within this directory, you find subdirectories for all the currently existing languages (CZ,DE, EN, ES etc).
  4. Copy the EN directory and rename the resulting directory to the language-code you want to translate into (e.g. FR for French, CN for Chinese, PT for Portugese…)
  5. Within that directory you find an asciidoc/src/ subdirectory, containing all the sections of arc42 as adoc (AsciiDoc) files.
  6. Translate as best as you can.
  7. When you’re finished, commit all the changes to your local repository. Then create a Pull-Request on the original arc42 Github repository (you might want to drop us an email to make sure we get notified… sometimes we oversee the standard Github notifications)

If you want to check your own translation, update the build.gradle file accordingly, that can help you generate a version specific to your language, so you can check out if everything is going well.

That’s it.. we’ll take care for the rest (check the translation, build the new distribution, publish on the arc42 website)