About 4 years ago I volunteered to translate the IJDb into German. In this article I want to describe how I got to doing it, what I got from it and first of all why everybody, even you, can and should help.

What You Can Do

Everybody can help! As long as you think the IJDb is a good site and feel like contributing to it, it is worth it. If you read this text in English, because it isn’t available in your language or your language is not available at the IJDb at all, you should ask yourself why it is like that. This website already is quite big and the task of translating it is huge and simply impossible if you work on your own. If you have some time, translate some text, a single article or if that is still too much effort to you, you could proofread the text that is already available in your language. The IJDb is full of spelling mistakes that have been overlooked, you can help here as well. Or, if you want to be really creative, write your own article and provide it to the IJDb. As long as your language is already present at the IJDb it will be simple to find someone to translate your text to English, and then it can be translated to all the other languages. Of course it is better if you also provide an English version of your article, that will make things easier.

You can also help by giving positive feedback; that encourages and motivates. Also negative feedback is good; it is the only way for us to improve and to fulfil your wishes.

I hope that some people respond to this article and feel like contributing towards the IJDb.

Just write an e-mail to:

• Articles: articles@jugglingdb.com
• Translations: translations@jugglingdb.com
• Spelling Mistakes: typos@jugglingdb.com

My Motivation

My motivation for translating this site is quite simple, ONE big community of jugglers to exchange each other and to provide help to beginners. Not that I am an Internet-Nazi and want only one single juggling site on the web, no, exactly the opposite. I want a page which brings together all juggling related resources available on the internet in a central point. The IJDb was on the best way to achieve that when I started the translations and today probably is THE site in terms of juggling.

But still, motivation left me a couple of times, months in which I didn’t translate a single word. Not even visited the IJDb. But every time there was a new article or an improvement on the site it encouraged me to keep going. The incentive was biggest when a new language was added to the site.

Additionally the IJDb gets more and more page views, this month around 150000 of which about 6% are in German – that makes 9000 views in my language, more than most (or all?) German juggling sites I know.

Of course I don’t claim this success for myself, it is the databases that make the IJDb what it is and therefore it is the success of the editors of the different sections. But I believe that the multilingual feature on the IJDb has made it a lot more attractive and thereby contributes towards the overall success of the site.

How I Got To Translating

At first I mostly used the IJDb as a portal to the online juggling world, looked at videos and surfed from website to website and on the side I watched the IJDb grow and grow. It was one of the few sites where one could see that work was being done and soon I saw that the IJDb had the potential to be more than just a portal, it could provide something I always missed when learning from books - feedback. An online resource for juggling that can help if you don’t understand something immediately. Sure, it didn’t have much content at that point, but the site was still young and seemed to be very active and constantly being worked on. All the time there were new articles, new videos, new links, in a word it was bustling. I always had an eye on the to-do list of the IJDb; I was waiting for some of the features Colin wanted to build in. Besides that there was the point ‘multilingual translations’ on this list, which I found really interesting. I hoped that the IJDb would be available in German one day and that Germans would contribute towards it with articles etc. – so I waited -

The First Step

After some time of waiting, in May 2002, I wrote an e-mail to Colin and asked what it looked like with the translations and if I could help.

I admit I never planned to translate the whole site, with all its articles and sections. I more or less planned to translate the menu and the front page, maybe some smaller articles, until I couldn’t be bothered with it anymore and then stop. Colin reacted very surprised to my e-mail, he didn’t believe anyone would ever volunteer for this task and sometimes I ask myself what I have driven myself into – I must be crazy! Colin immediately started writing the code for SiteTranslator, the PHP-script behind the multilingual feature of the IJDb.

So I immediately started to translate the menu and the front page, with the small hope of someone volunteering to help me.

The First Success

I found help much faster than I expected, only two weeks later. Unfortunately that wasn’t for the German translations, but for French and Spanish. To me that was a very positive experience, because I am sure that these translations wouldn’t exist or would have, at least, been available much later, if I hadn’t set the ball rolling. It still makes me proud and gives me satisfaction to see in how many languages the IJDb is available today.

At this point I would like to thank the other 15 translators for the work they have done so far, I hope others know to evaluate the effort you have put into this.

The Future

I know that, opposing to my first idea, I will still be translating for a long time, because I know it is for a good purpose. It makes me happy to contribute to a good cause, as long as I get something out of it. In this case I believe it is the thought of making it easier for beginners to learn juggling than it was for me, as long as they find this site. It is the small things that make me happy, like the link to the IJDb on Wikipedia.

I hope that more languages will be added in the future. I especially wait for the day when the IJDb is available in Chinese and Arabic, all ‚big’ languages would be covered then. I also hope for the day on which the German Google page spits out the IJDb on the first results page when I search for ‚Jonglieren’ – of course I dream of being number one ;)

And YOU can help us with it!

Send e-mails to:

• Articles: articles@jugglingdb.com
• Translations: translations@jugglingdb.com
• Spelling Mistakes: typos@jugglingdb.com