Atlassian has announced a global drive to recruit multiple in-country "ambassadors" to input to the development of its crowdsourced translations platform. The Australian-headquartered company specializes in collaboration tools and version control software for software developers. Its new Atlassian Translations service is designed to provide multiple language support to enable customers and partners to translate products collaboratively.
In the few weeks that the site has been live, the company says that users have entered over 100,000 translations. As a result, over 30 language packs are now available for Atlassian's core products: the JIRA bug issue tracker, the GreenHopper agile project management tool, and the Confluence enterprise wiki builder. Atlassian also produces team code review and coverage code analysis products under the brand names Crucible and Clover, respectively.
"Our 'ambassadors' role presents an awesome opportunity for passionate coders to evangelize the craft of software development within their countries," said Benjamin Naftzger, Atlassian sales & marketing director. "Ambassadors will be important in-country representatives, organizing community-based user groups, supporting and speaking at regional events, providing support to partners and our rapidly growing developer ecosystem."
These recent developments follow in the wake of Atlassian's acquisition of Bitbucket, a company known for its hosted code collaboration tools for the Mercurial distributed version control system (DVCS). As a DVCS decentralizes the software repository, each user is able to have a full copy of the source code repository on their local machine. This arguably allows users to work productively without being tethered to a network. Mercurial is a platform-independent, open source DVCS licensed under the GNU General Public License.
