Since 2017, I started to do some contributions to the Jenkins community. As a beginner, translation might be the easiest way to help the project. You don’t need to understand the whole context, even to create a ticket in the issue tracker system. Improvement of localization usually is minor. But some problems occurred soon, there isn’t a native speaker of Chinese that could review my PRs. So, sometimes my PRs are delayed from being merged into master.

Some contributors told me that I can start a thread at the mailing list. Normally, discussing at the mailing list is the open source community way. We got a lot of ideas for the localization from there. As a result, we achieved some goals that I’d like to share here.

JEP-216

Previously, language localization files were distributed in core and in each plugin. For this proposal, each language has a single localization plugin, such as Chinese Localization plugin. Finally, Localization Support Plugin and Chinese Localization plugin are able to support all types of localization resource files. From the plugins website, you can see that there are already 13 000 installations. We removed all Chinese localization files at the PR-4008.

I really appreciate Daniel Beck for helping me to add localization support, Liam Newman helping me to review JEP-216, and many other community members.

Chinese Localization SIG

We believe that this SIG could help to improve Jenkins experience for Chinese users and gather more contributors from China. This SIG is responsible for maintaining the Chinese Jenkins website, promoting the Jenkins community in China in the social media with WeChat account. We publish translated blog articles, Jenkins release notes, JAM or other events at the WeChat account. For now, there are 1800 followers that can read our news from the last half a year.

Especially, I want to say thanks to Wang Donghui, Zhai Zhijun, and other contributors. They did a lot of contributions. I wish I could see more and more folks join us.

About the Author
赵晓杰(Rick)

Rick is a big fan of Jenkins, also as a contributor leading the Jenkins China community.