**LingoStories - Contributing** # Overview Pretty much any kind of contribution is welcome. Focus on the things you can do well, and rely on other people for the rest. The following skills would be particularly appreciated: * **Teaching**. If you're a language teacher, your feedback is precious. You may review the texts, give feedback on our approach, or request features that would make LingoStories more useful to students or other teachers. * **Writing**. To provide more content on the website, we need people to help write the stories. Writing a full story is a significant work, but smaller contributions are also welcome: write a high-level scenario, help write some scenes or dialogues, or review the texts. * **Translation**. If you speak fluently other languages, you can help translate the stories. Some translators have limited free time, so it's always useful to have more than one translator per language (this means you can volunteer, even if your language is already on the website). * **Illustration**. We currently rely on generative AI to generate images. It would be nice to have actual artists to take care of the illustrations. * **Game Design**. The current stories are relatively basic, but they could be designed more like adventure video games, and integrate more gameplay elements. * **Programming**. There are always more things to do and polish. If you're interested in helping, you can [join the Discord](https://discord.gg/SEefvsutca) or leave a message in the [GitHub issue tracker](https://github.com/laurentlb/lingostories/issues). # Writing ## Guidelines * The source of truth for the stories is the English version. * The story should be suitable and appealing for the general audience worldwide. * Prefer vocabulary that is common in everyday life. * Choose a [CEFR level](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages#Common_reference_levels) and write the story accordingly. * See this [reference](https://www.esl-lounge.com/student/reference.php) sheet for vocabulary. * See [lingua.com](https://lingua.com/english/reading/) for text examples. * But don't worry too much --- it's fine to expose learners to new words and new grammar rules that might not know yet. * Avoid cultural references and country-specific biases that might not be relevant to people in other countries. * Avoid play-on-words and things that can be hard to translate. ## Tooling We first write and discuss stories using [Google Docs](https://docs.google.com/), which is convenient for sharing, collaborating and getting quick feedback. Later, stories are converted to [ink](https://github.com/inkle/ink). Ink can be intimidating at the beginning, but don't worry, we have people to help you! You can find .ink files of our [stories on GitHub](https://github.com/laurentlb/lingostories/tree/main/stories). # Translation Ask on Discord if you'd like to write or fix translations. We use a shared spreadsheet to write the translations. They are later converted to .json for the website.