Dengjen Werger

Volunteer translation doesn’t fail for lack of a translation tool — it fails because volunteers don’t sustain time commitment over months or years. Dengjen Werger is a commitment and peer-review layer that sits in front of existing translation platforms and turns a one-time favor into a habit: a personal time pledge, reminders, mandatory peer review, points, streaks, and a leaderboard.

It’s for contributors who want structure and accountability around volunteer translation work, and for reviewers and maintainers who need confidence that a live translation was actually checked by someone with standing to check it — not just typed once and shipped.

The initial target is translation for accessibility tooling that visually impaired users depend on, starting with Kurmanji-language strings for the NVDA screen reader on Crowdin. Language is a first-class field throughout the domain model, and translation platforms are integrated through one TranslationSource port, so later work can point the same commitment and review loop at other languages, other platforms, and apps beyond NVDA without a rewrite.

How it works

  1. Onboarding — pick a language, a commitment tier (Light/Medium/Heavy), and a timezone.

  2. Reminders — a scheduled job checks recorded progress against the tier’s quota and emails a nudge only when a contributor is falling behind.

  3. Submission — translating a work item creates a submission and a provisional points entry, held pending review.

  4. Review — another contributor claims the next queued item (first-in-first-out, not hand-picked) and approves or rejects it. Reviewing earns points immediately; approving pays out the submitter’s points and updates their streak.

  5. Leaderboard — ranked by confirmed points, per language.

No submission ships to the source platform without passing review.

Status

This project is at the scaffold stage: a Java / Spring Boot project built with Gradle, with CI and a /healthz route. The full commitment/review/points/streak/leaderboard loop is planned for v1. See the repository for the design spec, implementation plan, and current progress.

License

Licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3 or later (GPL-3.0-or-later).

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