This is the basics of the translation processes.  Note that there are several groups of people involved in the process:

  • program directors: part of the DIHQ staff responsible for the challenge materials
  • translation team: part of the DIHQ staff that directs translation of materials
  • web developers: combination of those that support scoring programs and the Resource Area
  • scoring program developers: basically the ICMs for scoring


  1. The program directors develop the final text of the challenges typically by mid-summer
    1. translation team starts working on other languages for the challenges and RotR
    2. website developers start on score sheets - this is described here.
    3. website developers start on this season's online forms - this is described here
    4. scoring program developers start on programming the scoring program XMLs

  2. The program directors review the score sheets and online forms text.
    This takes place over the summer and we settle on the text that will be used for Score Sheets and Online Forms.

  3. As is explained here, score sheets and online forms are described internally in the website as a collection of terms that can be phrases / paragraphs.  These terms can be collected into a structure called a translation set.  For example the technical challenge typically consists of 2 sets: one with challenge specific terms (called chal_a and a common set shared with other challenges called chal_common).  These sets can be exported as XML files for translators to translate.  When producing these XML files, we can ask Google Translate to supply initial text for terms in one or more languages.

  4. The translator team translate the terms in the XML files

  5. The XML files produced in #4 supply the correct translation for each term. These XML files can be read by the Resource Area so it knows the correct text to used for each term for each language.  The XML files are flexible so that different languages can be added at different times or a prior translation can be replaced with a new translation.


Step #5 can be done by anyone with admin privileges in the Resource Area.  The translation team tends to divide the work by language rather than challenge / online forms, so the translations can be delivered over time.  It is also possible that the scoring of the challenges are refined as the scoring program developers start implementing the challenges.  This can lead to changes also.  As a result, there is a bit of revisiting of earlier steps.  Hopefully the Manage Translation process is robust enough to recognize the changes and track the translations.