Contributors

Learn about project contributors, their roles, and the differences between contributors and team users.

Ilya Krukowski avatar
Written by Ilya Krukowski
Updated over a week ago

Contributors and team users

It's important to understand that there are two types of users in Lokalise:

  • Team users. In Lokalise, users are organized into teams. One team can contain many users, and one user can be a member of many teams. A team user has one of four roles (owner, admin, biller, and member), and you can find more information about these roles in the corresponding article.
    Please note that even if some user is a member of a team, it does not mean that s/he can contribute to a project within this team. Only the team owners are automatically added to all projects of the team; other users have to be added to projects explicitly. You can also take advantage of the team visibility feature and allow other members of your company to join the team.

  • Project contributors. A contributor is a user who has access to a certain Lokalise project. When a person joins a project as a contributor, s/he is automatically added to the corresponding team as well. By default, only the project admins can invite new contributors, but if the project has a public signup feature enabled (you can enable it by proceeding to More > Settings in your project) any person with the link can join.

In this article we will discuss project contributors. To learn more about teams and users, please check the corresponding documentation.

Managing contributors

To manage project contributors, click Contributors in the top menu:

You will be presented with a list of all currently added contributors:

For each contributor you can see:

  • Avatar.

  • Name.

  • E-mail.

  • Reference languages — a list of project languages that the contributor can read but not modify.

  • Contributable languages — a list of languages that the contributor can read and modify.

  • Whether the contributor has a reviewer role assigned. Both admins and translators can be assigned a reviewer role. Reviewers are responsible for quality assurance. They are able to mark translations as “reviewed” effectively saying that this translation is correct and can be used in production. This role is available only if you have the reviewing feature enabled in the project settings.

  • Whether the contributor is a project admin and which additional permission s/he has.

Each contributor adds to the total team users quota, in other words every new user means 1 occupied team seat (the number of available team seats depends on your subscription plan).

Please note that this quota is not strict. Even if you have reached the limit, you can still invite more users to the team (however, if you are paying with invoices, this feature will be unavailable). When a user is invited, a trial period of 7 days will be started, and during this period your team won't have to pay for additional seats. If you remove these additional users within the 7 days grace period, you won't be charged for extra seats. The grace period is displayed in the Team settings under each user profile.

After the trial ends, users will not be automatically removed from your team but they'll occupy a seat.

Adding contributors

To add a new or an existing user to the project, click the Add people or groups button. You'll see the following dialog:

  • Invite new user tab allows you to add new contributors to the project. These contributors will also become members of your team and will occupy team seats (remember that different subscription plans provide different numbers of team seats). You'll need to provide an email, a name, choose a role (see below for details), decide whether the contributor should be a reviewer, and finally choose the reference (read-only) and contributable (read/write) languages.

  • Add existing users tab allows you to add the existing team users to the current project. You'll be able to choose one or more users and adjust their permissions.

  • Under the user groups tab you'll be able to add one or more existing groups of team users to the current project. To learn more about user groups please check the corresponding article.

Importing contributors from another project

You can also import contributors from another project. To achieve that, click the Import from project button and choose one of the projects from the dropdown.

Please note that the users who already exist in the current project will be left intact and their permissions won’t be affected. Also, if a user from the chosen source project has permission to access only a specific language, but this language is not present in your current project, that user won’t be added as a contributor.

Contributors and professional translation orders

When you create a professional translation order and choose Lokalise as the provider, a translator and/or editor will be added to your project and your team automatically. However, these new users will not occupy a team seat.

Available roles

Now let's discuss what roles project contributors can have.

Project admins

Project admins have full read/write access to all project languages, however they can have limited access to the project features.

You can adjust the administrative rights by clicking the Customize dropdown. You can restrict access to the following functions of the project:

  • Upload files — admin will be able to upload translation files to the current project. During the uploading process new keys and translations might be added and existing entries might be updated or removed.

  • Download files — admin will be able to download translation files in any format from the current project. Please note that the admin will be able to include any translation keys and values into the download bundle.

  • Manage tasks — admin will be able to create, modify, and remove tasks within the current project, as well as assign contributors to these tasks.
    Please note that you don't need to assign this permission to contributors who are going to work on the assigned task! If a person is assigned to a task, they'll already have all the necessary access rights and they will be able to start translating or reviewing right away. The manage tasks permission should be assigned only to admins who are expected to create new tasks or manage existing tasks (modify task names, descriptions, due dates, and view statistics).

  • Manage contributors — admin will be able to add, modify, and remove contributors within the current project. Please note that admins with with the manage contributors permission will be able to assign other admins within the current project and modify their permissions.

  • Manage screenshots — admin will be able to upload new screenshots as well as modify and remove existing screenshots. Admins without the manage screenshots won't be able to link keys to existing screenshots.
    Please note that you don't need to assign this permission to regular contributors who need to only view the screenshots that were already linked to the translation keys (linked screenshots can be viewed by any contributor).

  • Manage glossary — admin will be able to add and manage glossary entries. Learn more on Glossary permissions in the corresponding articles.
    Please note that regular contributors who are non-admins will be able to view glossary entries when performing translations thus you don't need to grant them this permission.

  • Manage keys — admin will be able to add, modify, and remove existing translation keys. Please note that if your contributor should be able to perform translations, you don't need to grant them this permission. Rather, assign a contributable language to them. This way they'll be able to perform translations but not modify key names, filenames, and other technical details.

  • Manage languages — admin will be able to modify existing language settings and add new languages to the project.

  • Manage settings — admin will be able to modify settings for the current project (rename the project, add custom translation statuses, enable reviewing, and so on).

  • View activity — admin will be able to view project activity (files uploading, key modification, translation updates, and so on).

  • View statistics — admin will be able to view detailed project statistics.


Translators

Translators have limited access to your project. Translators have to be granted reference (read-only) and/or contributable (read-write) access to your project languages (adjusted on a language-by-language basis).


Reviewers

Both admins and translators can also be granted a reviewer role. This role becomes available once you enable Reviewing in project settings. Reviewers are able to mark translations as reviewed in the editor and approve any translation.

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