For non-developers, such as professional translators, editing files that aren’t native to Microsoft Office can be difficult. We built an application that uses template files for an assortment of different emails which are sent out to let users know when various types of activities occur. Adds, changes, comments, invoices, payments, all sorts of App things. We’re using Rails to serve our app, so the email templates all end with an extension ‘.html.erb’. We naively handed a pile of templates over to our translator without giving a second thought to what application they would be using to edit these files. Word? wrong! Notepad? yuk…

We’re trying out the github online editor for this purpose. We created a new repository with our language files and hope that they can be simply edited and saved directly on the github site. Each language has its own directory and we can import updates directly back into Rails when we’re done.

The rest of this article is just a quick tutorial for translators who have never used github.

1. Create your account —
2. If it’s a private repository, have the owner add you as a collaborator.
3. Open the repository where the translation files are stored:

4. Navigate into the ‘repository’ to find the files in the language to be translated. We use the standard ‘locale’ abbreviations for these folders. Kon’nichiwa ‘ja’:

5. Once you’ve found your way to the correct file to work on, editing on github is pretty simple:

Github has loads of great features that can be useful for anyone who needs to edit files and track revisions. Hopefully this little rundown on the basics will help a first time user/non-geek make the most out of these features.