Hello,

The 2007 Commons POTY (Picture of the Year) competition will be held in from 10 January to 24th. This is a call to translators to help support this event. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2007/Translati...

This year we are using custom software created by user:Bryan on the toolserver, because last year it was a small nightmare counting and verifying votes via editing a wiki page. There are three main sets of translation that we need:

* the software messages (about 30 sentences) * informational pages on Commons about how the competition runs, voting requirements and who to contact if there is a problem (minimum 3 pages, all pretty short) * announcements that are sent to various mailing lists and village pumps. (4 messages, quite short)

We especially need these languages: Dutch Polish Italian Japanese Russian Chinese Swedish Portuguese Norwegian Finnish

(French and Spanish are complete; German only needs the announcements translated; Dutch, Russian and Swedish are partially complete.)

These are the languages of the top 15 Wikipedias - projects that have over 100,000 articles.

We also need volunteers for *all* these languages who are interested in being on the organising committee as "language contacts". See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2007/Committee for more info. It is a really simple commitment: you agree to help anyone who speaks that language with any problems they have, in the voting process. You also post the announcements to the various Village Pumps and so on. You will still get to vote in the competition and you DON'T have to actually translate anything (or vice versa), although obviously it would be nice.

Even if you just translate one thing, it is a big help. The wiki way is step by step :)

All you need to know is here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2007/Translati...

thankyou! please forward to other people you know who might be able to help.

cheers, Brianna user:pfctdayelise