Let’s translate it: ONLYOFFICE congratulates all on the International Translation Day

Hello, everyone!

With the International Translation Day coming up, we would like to thank all our translators for their great work and wish them continued success! Therefore we have interviewed an Italian translator Simone Rizzo who helped a lot of people use ONLYOFFICE in Italian. So let this story inspire you.

About Simone

Simone Rizzo, 36, is from Messina, Italy. Graduated from Electronics and Telecommunication High School in 2000; loves technology, philosophy, and reading. As a kid, he developed an interest in English but had to wait until the secondary school to study the language properly.

Then I understood the power of language and the chances it would give in order to make people closer to each other. So along with my educational background, I tried to get in touch with different cultures, approaching them by reading books.

Simone is disabled since birth. Describing himself, he says that reading books helps him travel and discover a lot of things while talking with foreigners online gives him more options to think about not to be stuck in the reality he lives in.

Simone is engaged in making “mods” for racing sims on the PC platform. He is working on the sounds and some textures with a small team of nice guys, and likes it as he believes “it’s a perfect mix between reality and creativity”.

One day, while searching for an office suite, Simone came across ONLYOFFICE, and after a fast trial, he believed in its potential.

I decided to translate ONLYOFFICE into Italian as it’s nice to make this business a better place by having more and more competitors. I tried contacting the team asking about the dev status, plans for translation (in Italian) and I had a very good first impression just by reading the first answers. So I was happy when they gave me this chance.

Translation of the ONLYOFFICE portal was not that complicated for Simone, who faced a few difficulties during the process. When he had some doubts he e-mailed developers, asking for other opinions and points of view. Besides, he tried to have a screen comparison in order to have the closest UI experience and used words and terms which are common for any Italian user.

ONLYOFFICE Online Translation System, used by all our translators, allows you to see created translations in all languages. Simone finds it really convenient: when some words or phrases were not available in English, he translated those parts from Russian. A basic knowledge of Russian helped him handle this task.

It’s always a useful experience when what you do can be used and makes you feel comfortable with it. You need to be open-minded and ready to satisfy others, friend or business – it doesn’t really matter. Share what you know is the only key.

Simone thinks it would be nice to have a live test of the overall progress in order to see how the UI feels like. To his mind, it could be useful for the whole process of translating ONLYOFFICE to other languages.

He also adds that all languages are different. For example, Italian is very complex and formal in business, however, very friendly in private. This condition must be taken into account in any translation.

So, when you face a task like this you must stay in the middle and make the user feel comfortable and not silly.

We’ve made further steps to the multilingual portal interface: ONLYOFFICE 9.5 with major updates in portal languages is about to be released soon. You will able to assess all upgrades next week. Dutch has been added as a new portal language. Turkish, Vietnamese, Italian, Chinese, Polish and Ukrainian have been considerably updated. Stay tuned and follow our news!

If you would like to contribute to ONLYOFFICE translation, read our guide on how to become an ONLYOFFICE translator in the Help Center or contact us directly at documentation@onlyoffice.com.

Happy International Translation Day!