How this works

Thank you for doing this. Our films and writings reach people in thirty languages, and most of that text was translated by a machine. You are the person who makes it sound like it was written by someone who understood it.

A few minutes per page. Please don't let it become a chore.

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What you need

Your personal link. It already knows who you are and which language you are checking — nothing to log into, nothing to type. Keep it to yourself: it is yours, and it is the only way in. There is no password to remember and no general address that works instead. If you lose it, or it stops opening, just ask for a new one. That takes a minute and costs nothing.

A website login. A username and password for awakentheworld.com, so you can fix the text you find. It only lets you edit your own language. You cannot break anything else, and you never see the admin area.

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Start here — the order matters

Do this once at the start of a session and everything after it is easy.

1 · Sign in to the website first, before you open anything. In one tab, go to awakentheworld.com and log in with your translator account. This is the step that makes the rest work: the editing tools only appear for someone who is signed in. Open a page without it and you get the page as a visitor sees it, with no way to correct a word.

2 · Open your personal link in a second tab, and leave it there. Your list appears straight away, with your name on it. If you cover more than one language it asks which one you are working on today. This tab is where you come back to after each page, and it keeps your place all session.

3 · Open a page from the list. Every row has Open this page ↗. Because you are already signed in, it opens in your language and ready to edit, in a new tab — your list stays exactly as it was behind it.

4 · Read it as a visitor would. Not as a proofreader comparing against the English, but as someone who landed here looking for something. You're asking:

• Does this sound like a person wrote it?
• Are our key terms translated the way you agreed in the glossary?
• Is anything confusing, comical, or plain wrong?
• Do the buttons and menus make sense?

5 · Fix what you can, there on the page. Hover over any text and a small pencil appears. Click it, correct the text in the panel that opens, save. That's the whole edit — no admin area, no forms.

6 · Come back to your checklist and press one button.

Comment opens a small box. Write whatever is useful — something you couldn't fix, a question, a suggestion. It reaches Alex and everyone else working on your language, and any of them can reply to you directly. The row then reads Comment sent — Alex has it, so you can see at a glance which pages you have raised something about.

That's it. It saves the moment you click. There is no submit button, nothing to send and nothing to lose. The row turns green and the counter at the top moves. Stop whenever you like: close the tab, come back next weekend, and it is exactly where you left it.

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Finding your way around the list

There are about a hundred pages in the main list, and more in the other tabs. It is built to be folded up rather than scrolled through, so the first few minutes are worth spending on the shape of it.

Tabs — the parts of the site

When more than one part of the site is open for checking, tabs appear above the list. Each carries its own count and its own progress, so one is never waiting on another, and each can reach 100% on its own.

If you see only one tab, only that part is open at the moment. They are opened when a language is ready for them; nothing appears without warning.

The Store works differently from everything else. There are more than five hundred products, and checking them one at a time in thirty languages is not a job anybody would ever finish — so there is one row per shop section. Verifying that row means the section and the products listed in it read properly. Look at the section page, spot-check a handful of products, and the row is done.

Sections fold

Every section has a blue heading with a triangle beside it — Meditation, Practice, Films, Samadhi Series, Interviews, Resources, Support, About. Click the heading to fold the section away; click again to open it.

The app remembers what you left open, per tab, so your list looks the way you left it when you come back. Each heading shows its own count — 8 of 12 — so you can see where a section stands without opening it.

This is the single most useful habit: close everything, then open one section at a time. A hundred rows is daunting. Twelve is an evening.

Two badges

Quick check needs explaining, because it looks like a trick. Those pages — the individual guided meditations, mostly — are built from a video feed. The titles and descriptions inside the feed are translated once, and then appear corrected on every page that shows the feed. So the fourteenth meditation page is not a fourteenth piece of work; it is the same text you already fixed, plus one heading. The badge is there to stop a list of fourteen looking like a fortnight.

The same is true of the film series pages and the galleries: the series listing that repeats on all five Samadhi pages is one string, not five.

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Pages whose content is in English

Some pages carry a line saying so: "These meditations are narrated in English", "This content is in English".

The audio and video on those pages really is English only — the guided meditations are narrated in two languages, and subtitles are no use to someone meditating with their eyes closed. Rather than hide the material or push you to the English site, we say plainly what it is and leave it there for anyone who wants it anyway.

These rows are checked normally. You are not being asked to translate anything that isn't there. Read the page, check the text around the video, and check the notice itself — that sentence matters more than most, because it is what stops a visitor waiting for a translation that is never coming. If it reads badly in your language, fix it like any other text.

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The glossary

There is a Glossary button at the top of your checklist. It opens a panel holding 91 words and phrases that recur across the site — and it opens over your list, so you never lose your place. You can reach it in the middle of checking a page, look a word up, and close it again.

The terms aren't a guess. We read every English page and counted how many pages each one appears on, so this is the vocabulary a visitor actually meets.

It's in four groups, and the panel shows them in this order.

There is no save button, and there does not need to be. Type your wording into the box under a term and press Enter, or simply click away — it is saved at that moment, exactly like the page buttons. The counter on the Glossary button shows how far you have got, and the search box finds any term in a second when you meet it on a page.

Where you see suggestions. For many terms we found what our previous website used in your language, and it appears as a button under the box — "The previous site used: самадхи". Click it to accept, or ignore it and write your own. Some of those old translations were done by a machine years ago, so treat them as a starting point rather than an answer. Yours is the one that counts. Where the old site used two different words for the same thing, you'll see both — choosing between them is exactly the kind of decision we need.

Why it matters: the machine's failure here isn't wrong sentences, it's drift. It renders true nature three different ways on three different pages and the site reads as though three people wrote it, even though nothing is strictly incorrect. Your glossary is the fixed point you correct towards.

What happens to your answers. They don't just sit in a list. The translation system has a glossary of its own, and we load your answers straight into it, so from then on the machine translates those terms the way you decided — everywhere on the site, including pages nobody has opened yet. Terms we want left in English we mark as such, and it leaves them.

Two things worth knowing. It applies to text the machine translates from then on, so wording already on a page you have verified stays exactly as you left it — your edits always win. And where the system already had a wording for a term, we never overwrite it; a real disagreement is brought to us to settle rather than decided silently.

How to shape an answer, now that a machine reads it too. Give one wording per term, in its base form — the way a dictionary lists it, masculine singular where your language makes that choice. Not a pair, not two options separated by a slash, and no note in brackets: whatever you write can be placed into the page exactly as you typed it. If you want to say something about a term, use the comment button instead. Lowercase is usually best, unless the word is a name; the translation system adjusts capitals to fit the sentence.

Do not worry that the base form will not fit every sentence. What the glossary decides is which word the machine reaches for, not how it conjugates it — the translation system still handles grammar, and where it gets an ending wrong, you fix it on the page and your fix stands for good.

When to do it. Have a look through it before you start, but don't try to settle every row cold. Do the Site-wide section and a few priority pages first, then fill it in — an hour of answers after seeing real pages beats an hour of answers before. You can change any answer later; the box is always editable.

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Who decides what — ambassadors and collaborators

Most of this guide is the same for everybody. This section is the one place the two roles differ, so it is worth reading once even if you are working alone.

Each language has one ambassador, who owns the translation decisions in it. Anyone else working on that language is a collaborator. Both do exactly the same work — open pages, read them, fix them, press Verified — and both can leave comments and raise anything they like.

The difference is one thing only: whose glossary answer the site uses.

If you are a collaborator, what you type in the glossary appears under the box marked waiting for your ambassador, and they see it as a chip they can accept with one click. Nothing you write is lost, and nothing you write quietly overwrites a decision they have already made.

If you are the ambassador, the reverse: your colleagues' suggestions appear under the box with their name on them, including where they disagree with what you have already chosen. Take them or leave them.

If you are not sure which you are, it does not matter for anything except the glossary — and the glossary tells you, on the box itself.

If you are working with someone else

The page list is shared. If your colleague verifies a page, it shows as done for you too and the row says who did it. That is the point — you divide the work rather than doing it twice.

Where a language has more than one person, each row also carries an I'm on this button. Pressing it tells the others you have started, so nobody spends the same evening on the same page. It is only a note: it doesn't reserve anything, and it clears itself after a day.

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How much email you get

You will get a message when someone leaves a comment in your language, and occasionally a note from the organisers. If that is more than you want, every email we send has a link at the bottom where you can choose:

Opening that link changes nothing — it shows you three buttons and waits. And whichever you choose, you still hear about your own pages.

Please don't press Unsubscribe. Your mail program may show that button on our messages. It is added automatically, we cannot switch it off, and pressing it silently stops everything reaching you — including the notices about pages you checked yourself. The link above is the one that does what you actually want, and replying to any of our emails reaches a person.

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A few things worth knowing

Tick each page as you finish it, if you can. Some people prefer to go through several pages in WordPress and come back to tick them off together. That works, and nothing breaks. But there are two reasons to tick as you go that aren't obvious. Your colleagues read the list rather than your intentions — on a shared language an unticked page looks like an undone one, and someone may spend an evening repeating your work. And the date on your tick is what we compare the English against: if we edit a page on Wednesday and you tick it on Friday having actually read it on Monday, the row won't come back to you the way it should, because nothing knows you read it before the change.

A page can come back. If we edit the English after you have verified a page, that row reappears marked changed — please look again. Only that page, and only for the people who had already checked it. Where we know what changed there is a dated line beside the row, and often a link reading open the part that changed — which takes you to that exact paragraph on your own language's page, not the English one. If the same page changes twice and you have already dealt with the first change, you only see the second.

And sometimes it deliberately won't come back. A typo fixed in the English, or a change with no bearing on your language, can be marked as needing no recheck. The page stays green and nobody is asked to look again. If you think that was the wrong call, say so — Comment is the fastest way.

There's a Progress button at the top, next to Glossary. It shows how every language is getting on, and everyone who is helping, with a link back to your checklist. Languages are listed, people are never ranked. Two things there are worth knowing: each part of the site is counted separately, so a language that has finished the website reads as finished even if a part opened last week is still at zero — nothing you were never offered counts against you. And key pages done appears against a language once every page badged priority has been verified in it. Nineteen pages, a couple of evenings, and it is the real milestone: the moment the site works for someone arriving in your language for the first time.

Don't aim for a perfect literary translation. Aim for text a native speaker finds natural and clear. Good and finished beats perfect and abandoned.

Where the English itself is awkward, tell us. Sometimes a translation is faithful to English that wasn't very good to begin with. That's worth knowing.

Three names stay in English, and only three: ATW, Daniel Schmidt and The IAM Project.

The film and series titles are yours to decide. Samadhi, Inner Worlds Outer Worlds, Awakening Mind, Stepping Stones, Samadhi Center, and the teachers' names. If your language already has an established title — and several do, from our older site — use it, and use it the same way on every page. Where the title labels a link to a video, keep the English visible too, because the video itself is titled in English.

Some English is not ours to change. The words inside the YouTube player — Watch on, Tap to unmute — come from YouTube, not from us, and will stay in English in every language. Same for the share buttons: X, Facebook, WhatsApp. Please don't spend time on those.

Two pages are nearly empty. The White Stone and The Mind Pond Analogy are a video and a title. Thirty seconds each, not a mistake.

Pages get added. The site is still growing, and the app reads the live website rather than a list somebody typed once. New rows will appear in your list on their own. That is working as intended, not a mistake.

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Where to start

1. Site-wide — two rows: the homepage, and the menu, footer, buttons and form labels. Do these first, whatever else you do. They appear on every page of the site, so a clumsy word here is a clumsy word two hundred times.
2. The rows badged priority — the pages the website's own menu links to. These are what a first-time visitor actually sees, and finishing them earns your language the key pages done mark.
3. Everything badged quick check — fourteen rows, and genuinely quick. Good for an evening when you have twenty minutes rather than two hours.
4. The rest, section by section, in whatever order suits you. Fold the ones you have finished; the list gets shorter as you go, which is the point.

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Questions

Reply to whoever sent you the link, or press Comment on any row. There's no wrong question, and if something in this guide is unclear that's our fault, not yours.

Thank you. This is quietly one of the most useful things anyone does for the project — the difference between someone in your language feeling spoken to and feeling processed.

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