We are pleased to announce that we are now accepting community translations for the SecureDrop Client, the graphical application at the heart of the (beta) SecureDrop Workstation, through which journalists can more conveniently and efficiently communicate with sources and securely view their submissions.

The SecureDrop Client displaying a conversation with a source.

The SecureDrop team at the Freedom of the Press Foundation has long partnered with a community of volunteer translators, coordinated by Localization Lab, to translate SecureDrop from English into 20 languages used by journalists and sources around the world.

While the SecureDrop Workstation is currently in a closed pilot program with select news organizations, all of whom are English-speaking, we are committed to making the Workstation and Client available to users in as many languages as possible. The Client (currently 665 words in 95 strings) joins the SecureDrop server (2,542 words in 335 strings).

SecureDrop’s documentation now includes information for translators interested in contributing to the translation of the Client and providing feedback to the SecureDrop team. Translators may also be interested in technical details of the Client’s internationalization process, including how it differs from that of the SecureDrop server.

We’re also trying something new: feedback and translations can be submitted immediately after a string is added or changed, and new languages can be added at any time. This “continuous translation” model is intended to involve translators throughout the development process, not just during a designated translation period.

We will release the Client with a new translation when we consider it to be well-supported at or near 100% translation coverage. Please get in touch with us if there’s a particular language you’d like to see supported in the Client. Translations using right-to-left scripts require additional technical work before we can support them fully.

We are grateful to the Internews BASICS program for funding a significant portion of this work.