**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. It can be an entire story, or part of it, or just a scenario. * **Translation**. If you speak fluently other languages, you can help translate the stories. * **Illustration**. We currently rely on generative AI to generate images. Future stories could have better illustrations if someone volunteers. * **Game Design**. The current stories are basic, but they could be designed as adventure video games, they could 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. * Use 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 understand. * 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 The recommended tool for writing stories is [Twine](https://twinery.org/2/). This makes it easy to visualize and test branching stories. But it's also possible to make the first drafts in [Google Docs](https://docs.google.com/), which is convenient for sharing, collaborating and getting quick feedback. ### Twine We can import in LingoStories only the Twine that are the most basic. The current limitations are: * Each passage should start with a paragraph of text (without any markup language). * The passage ends with a list of links, with one link per line, e.g. `[[Open the door->15]]` No other feature is supported at the moment, but they might be added later. It would be nice to have basic support for variables in the future. # Translation Go to [https://lingostories.org/contrib/](https://lingostories.org/contrib/) if you want to make a new translation or update any existing translation. There are two ways to do the translations. ## With the web interface * Select the story and the language to update (or "New Language" it doesn't exist yet). * This allows you to see each sentence with the translation. * Update the text fields. * Click "Save" to get a text file that contains your changes. ## Offline * Select the story and a language. * Click "Save" to get a text file that contains all the sentences in that language. * You can update the text file, but make sure to keep the exact same structure (keep in sentence per line, keep the lines in the correct order). * You can later use the "Load" button to see your changes in the web interface, and verify the lines match the translations. !!! Tip Once you have the text file, you may copy its content and use machine translation website. However, you have to review and edit the content. You can send only translations that you can personally verify and vouch for.