Technology for Collaborating

Now that we have gotten a few pages translated, we are investigating the best way to facilitate multiple people contributing. Currently, we are exploring using Github, a site that is widely used for collaborating on software development, as a place to keep and track the translated text and to accept updates. Github also has a feature they call Pages that allows you to publish information as web pages.

Github pages supports Markdown, a simple way to format text that is also used in the Duolingo forums. into HTML, which should work for most of what we are doing. The exception is that Markdown (at least the Jekyll implementation) seems like it may not be adequate for more complex tables, and there are a lot of tables in the Caighdeán. We can hand-code HTML tables in order to make arbitrarily complex tables, but since we can’t expect all contributors to be able to do that, we’ve discussed using an intermediary format, e.g. spreadsheets, for recording the translations. In that way, we can separate translating Irish from coding in HTML, so interested contributors can do what they do best.