Quick links:
- TypeRacer International – Status Tracker
- User-Contributed Content (See all previous submissions)
- User-Contributed Content (Public Form – Submit content here)
- Report errors and other feedback on content (Public Form)
- TypeRacer Discord chat – channel #new-text-discussion is a place to discuss adding new content, in any language.
9 Languages Refreshed on TypeRacer
Over the past few months we’ve been doubling down on expansion into new languages on TypeRacer. Although we first launched TypeRacer International way back in 2009, most of our non-English languages have relied on Google Translate — and the content quality has been poor. We remain committed to phasing out all of the bad Google Translate content and replacing it with 100% user-submitted content from TypeRacers like you, in different countries all over the world.
Today we’re pleased to announce that in the following languages, content is now 100% user-submitted – no more Google Translate.
- French (here)
- German (here)
- Italian (here)
- Russian (here)
- Korean (here)
- Arabic (here)
- Chinese (Traditional) (here)
- Polish (here)
- Vietnamese (here)
In addition, the number of quotes in Portuguese and Spanish were significantly increased. See the latest status of all languages, including the number of texts, in Google Sheets here.
Thanks to the following users who contributed significantly to the efforts: typeASDFracer, Warrior, Brugen, Glevion, Jeronimo/SlowMotion, 4nn4n45, Jooker21, Andreaak00, ThePerfidious, Sponandi, Lorissou_, Fou Dubulbe, pissdrache, bhuyquang1, beporacer, uaqlover, oli86, Signal1, and sarait90.
How can you help?
The TypeRacer International project belongs to everyone, and we welcome volunteers to get involved, no matter how much time you have — from 10 minutes to 10 months.
If you want to contribute for 10 minutes
- Submit a few quotes from your favorite books, movies, etc. using the “Contribute” form
- Do races in your favorite languages, and report any content problems.
Most of our non-English languages have only 1-2 hundred texts, and we always need more — so help submit great content in your language. In addition, since all the content is user-submitted, and we don’t speak all the languages in the world, we know there could be some content errors — misspellings, grammar, even characters that cannot be typed. Let us know and we’ll fix it.
If you want to contribute for a few hours
In the past, it’s been challenging to engage with our volunteers to localize TypeRacer in different languages. Adding texts into our database was a manual process; we’d have to train people on how to do this (it’s extremely boring) and people would often lose interest quickly. We have now automated the text-entry, and that means our volunteers can now focus on the most important work – identifying high-quality, interesting content in your languages.
If you have a few hours, you can submit a spreadsheet to us (Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets) including all the required info for 50+ quotes, and we’ll upload your content directly to TypeRacer. Required info is title, author, actual content to type, language, type (book/movie/song/etc.), and ASIN/ISBN-10. You can reference the format here.
Tips:
- Only use content from published sources.
- If your book/movie/song isn’t available on Amazon, use 0000000000 (ten zeros) for the ASIN/ISBN.
- Use find/replace to remove non-typeable characters. The most common examples in English are below, but your language may be different.
- — should be –
- – should be –
- “ and ” should be “
- ‘ and ’ should be ‘
- … should be …
- If any of your quotes are long, consider also adding a short version, so typists of different skill levels can enjoy the content.
Since other TypeRacers may have already submitted some content in your language, you can also help us review previous submissions. To do so, you can (1) save a copy of our user-submitted content database to your Google Drive, (2) delete the bad content or fix any errors in your language, and (3) save the good content to the spreadsheet you send to us.
Since our submissions form previously was missing a lot of languages (and is still missing a few), you may need to check “Other” to find content in your language.
The bottom line: Give us a spreadsheet of high-quality content with 50+ quotes in your language (from your favorite books, and/or the content submitted by others) and we can add it to TypeRacer — usually within 3-5 days.
If you want to be a dedicated leader for your language
Contact us at support@typeracer.com, or come to our Discord channel and check out #new-text-discussion. Because we can only read a few languages, we hope to find leaders for different languages who can help with reviewing submissions (same as above), reviewing feedback about typos/inappropriate content etc. and fixing them in our system, and coordinating with other volunteers in your language.