One year to the project “What If?”. About creating and working with the enthusiastic translator community

About a year ago, on June 26, Randall Monroe, the author of the xkcd comic, started the project “ What If? ". The essence of the project is that Randall, from a physical point of view, answered “stupid” questions, which were often viewed from unexpected points of view. Of course, Randall did not miss the opportunity to make a planetary catastrophe during the response.

But the article is not about that. I would like to tell about the “ What if? ”Where we translate articles from“ What If? ”. It was not for nothing that I published an article in the project management hub (UPD: We were moved to I am promoting, and we are what, but we are nothing), since the article will be about how we manage it and what happened in less than a year (I started doing it in early September 2012).
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Long historical introduction

By the time I started, I found several websites with translations, but all of them were not very successful, the translation quality mostly suffered, but most of all I didn’t like the design.

So I got to work, and things went very smartly. I quickly translated from a dozen texts, riveted the site quickly, published it, collected the first reviews, reworked a lot of things in the process. In general, the project has earned.

At first, I tried to translate articles the same day, although I did not translate pictures, I did not bother with typography, but I tried to translate well. And then, as there were more people in the project, we smoothly moved to the publication on Thursday.

Success came when they did not wait. In a post on the Habré about 13 gigapixel xkcd comics, I advertised my site and went home. When I arrived, I saw a sharply jumped attendance schedule and a very high load on the server. I was on edge and quite quickly corrected all the found flaws and improved the site. At that time, the site consisted of markdown files on a githab, which I then manually uploaded to the site.



In the same place I got acquainted with bobermaniac in absentia. At first, I was somehow embarrassed to contact him, it was too good for him to translate. But I actively improved my text with pieces from his translations (the license allows, after all). As a result, we somehow got in touch, and from that moment begins “we” in the history of the project.

We have been thinking how to translate together. And not just together, but with the intention to expand the team. Github fell away immediately. First, the high threshold of entry, and secondly - just uncomfortable. And we smoothly switched to notabenoid.

I rewrote the site a couple of times, added this and that. And then it dawned on me - you need to make a group of VKontakte and begin to promote all sorts of "fishnet".

The bad thing is simple. A little stepping on the throat of conscience on the subject "well, you can not spam with all your group" and "how people will look at me if I post links to your site," and now, the group is rapidly gaining popularity, and there is some response "Tweak". And here he is, a sharp rise in attendance. And translators began to come to us.

About the anarchic-democratic dictatorship

That is how I can characterize our social system.

When translators began to come in quantity, it was time to think about the hierarchy and how to organize the translation process.

First of all, we developed a “guideline”, which describes the philosophy of the project, describes the style of translation, the rules of design and gives many typical mistakes of translators. He is sent in a “welcome” letter along with instructions on how to join the project.

Actually, I'll tell you, the documentation is all over the head. Even in a project like ours.

And every Tuesday, as soon as a new release appears, I convert it into the format we need, add a translation to notabenoid and send out to all translators. In the mailing list, I usually add in addition to information about the translation, a couple more tips, which I try to correct the work of the team.

So, the translator has completed the necessary operations, and is ready to translate.

At first, of course, many people do not translate very well, because of the lack of practice. And the practice we have - heaps.

I can divide the people who come to us into several categories: "

• "Machine gunners" - those who quickly translate the text.
• “Stylists” - who feel the English language and suggest successful turnovers and suggest English-speaking realities.
• "Editors" - who feels good Russian and effectively correct errors in the translated text.

It is clear that the more people, the more chaos, and with more than one number of people, it is often impossible to come to some kind of decision. So, in our process of the emergence of people, the structure was constantly changing.

At first everything was translated, and then I corrected and edited the text, and selected the best of the translated pieces for publication on the site.

Then I began to translate less and less, because often the translation was ready for nothing, before I even had the opportunity to do this, the text was already ready. And I could only carry out the correction of the text and collect the final, but translate the pictures.

And so on.

Now we have both translators and editors in the team (by the way, I even hired a proofreader to correct errors in already published articles and on the site in general), there are people who collect the text, and all I have to do is read it, translate Pictures and publish. Slowly, the social component of the translation service begins to work. Pieces of translation are actively discussed, people vote, in general, there is a movement.

Statistical survey

I think this section will be most interesting to site owners, in it I would like to talk about the "promotion" of the project.

I love charts, diagrams, they can make scientific from any article.

Now the site regularly comes to 600 people who are viewing 3,000 pages per day.

The site has 700 RSS subscribers and 800 VKontakte subscribers.

In the first three days after the release, an average of 3,500–5,000 people visit the site.



For all the time of its existence, the site was visited 125,000 times and viewed 370,000 pages. And on average, a person sits on the site for five and a half minutes.



More than half of visitors use Safari / Chrome, a quarter - Opera and Firefox, and only 2% use IE. Approximately 10% of visitors come to the site from the phone.

I have already mentioned a couple of methods of promotion: creating a group of VKontakte and posting on all sorts of entertainment resources.

In contact with

One of the two most successful solutions in terms of promotion.

Firstly, the response of users (notorious likes) became very visible and the users themselves became clearer. VKontakte provides quite useful statistical tools due to which the site’s audience becomes much clearer. Plus, the distance between us and visitors, as well as between the translators themselves, is significantly reduced.

And the role of the group in popularizing the site is difficult to overestimate, after the publication of VKontakte, up to 200 people come to the site per hour, which in my opinion is quite a lot.

Entertainment resources

Bad decision. It takes time and effort, but almost no effect. Separate posts can rise high in the rating of a site, but there is no use in going to the site and / or subscribing to it.

Personally, my opinion: it’s better to give this type of popularization to the visitors themselves.

One ring to rule everyone

The largest and most tangible effect was given by not VKontakte and non-entertainment resources. The biggest effect was the creation of a page with a list of translations.

On average, adding this page increased the number of views by almost 3 times.

Most of all, the site comes from Habra, VKontakte, Picaboo, Twitter, Facebook (I did not expect it).

We are even found in search engines, oddly enough, and Google is much ahead of Yandex.

Technical support

At the heart of the site we have Maxsite CMS, a fairly good control system, easy, fast, easily expandable. Purely in order to understand how easy it is, when the meteorite fell on Chelyabinsk, we had 10 requests per second at the peak (even the statistics did not have time to be considered properly). But we have not even begun to use the CMS caching capabilities, while just enough enabled APC.

The translation itself is performed on the notabenoid service platform, the only thing that does not suit me personally is: there is no change history and there is no possibility to import text to the site (by the way, nobody knows, do they have an API there?). Therefore, there is an idea about the implementation of such functionality within our site.

As I wrote above, as a markup language, we use Markdown with a slightly filed Markdown Extra extension. What else is there to comment on? I don’t know, we are satisfied with everything, and the abundance of features (for example, footnotes) pleases incredibly.

Project Plans

First, keep translating “What If?”.

Secondly, we are planning to transfer all comics untranslated by the xkcd.ru project. For this, I am developing a platform for translation. There are a number of technical difficulties (for example, translation of a 13 gigapixel comic book, which, if combined into one file, simply cannot be opened in the editor).

Thirdly, to create a more convenient system for translating specifically “What If?” With whistles and poetess.