Volunteering for Pledgebank
Pledgebank is our most widely-translated website. It’s currently available in 14 languages, thanks to a volunteer with a particular interest in languages – more about him below. If your language isn’t covered, and you are a confident translator, here’s how you can contribute.
But there are other ways to get involved, too, as you’ll see when you read on.
Meet our volunteers
Tim has been one of mySociety’s volunteers since 2005. Having heard about us through an article in the Guardian, he started out by translating Pledgebank into Esperanto, now pretty much manages the site’s user support, and has contributed other skills too – not least catering for more than 40 people at our annual retreats.
Tim’s a primary school language teacher, so translation was a natural way in for him. He reckons he spends anything from five minutes to 3-4 hours a day on his volunteer work, depending on how much there is to do. Mostly it’s support for Pledgebank’s users, responding to their queries by email. He’s also overseen all 13 translation projects.
Tim likes a challenge, which is what first attracted him to the task of translating Pledgebank into Esperanto, but he was also motivated by the idea of Pledgebank as a tool for the Esperanto community, to help and encourage people to organise events in what is a very widely- and thinly-spread group.
Many years later, what keeps him going are the people involved with mySociety, and the fact that he’s proud to be associated with our organisation’s many projects. Making a contribution and taking PledgeBank.com forward still feels important.
Find out more
Keen to help translate? Or maybe you have another idea about how you could contribute to Pledgebank. As you’ve seen, Tim approached us with an idea we hadn’t thought of – translation into Esperanto – and ran with it. So whatever your ideas, let us know!