Project Management Software Trello Crowdsources Its Way To 20 Languages

Project management software, Trello, has now gone that bit more global by officially announcing it is now available for use in 20 languages around the world.

You could be mistaken when you look at the official Trello Blog post for thinking the real news is that their cartoon husky Taco has learned to pilot a plane in high orbit, if you just look at the picture that accompanies the news. This however is far from the truth.

No, the real story here is the fact that the people at Trello have effectively crowdsourced the browser based popular project management tool into a truly international WebApp.

Trello is a piece of project management software, a tool that allows people working on projects to do so in a collaborative fashion and communicate, share and upload files that anyone with access to a specific work board, can use.

Up until now however, frequent users of Trello will of course be more than familiar with Taco, using him as they have to handle language translations.

For those who don’t, Taco is effectively the Trello equivalent of the old Microsoft Office Help Paper-Clip, but crucially, one that actually does a pretty good job.

But in their ongoing efforts to increase Trello’s user base and usability across language barriers, over 500 ordinary everyday users of Trello recently volunteered their time to crowdsource the new languages.

Over a 4 month time period, 47,000 words were translated into 16 new languages. This means that in less than half a year, Trello has gone from supporting 4 languages, into 20. And that’s not bad going.

The result of all that work and effort on behalf of people who gave up their time now means that Trello, that at the start of 2016 only supported Portuguese, French, Spanish, German, and well, obviously, English, now has an ability to help people plan and work on their projects in the following languages:

Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Czech, Dutch, Italian, Turkish, Thai, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Vietnamese.

But it’s not like Trello automatically knows if you are from Norway or Japan.

New and current users of Trello will still have to change their language settings themselves to get the most out of the project tool.  Fortunately, it’s rather easy to do, and the people at Trello have even produced a simple guide on how to do it.

But there are some caveats users in the new languages should be aware of. As the Trello blog itself says:

“Since real, live people did 100% of the translations, you might see an error or two. Hey, everyone makes mistakes. Please let us know if you see something that doesn’t look quite right by emailing us at [email protected].”