Dear Team

We have added discussion topics in Transifex regarding the addition of new Waze linguists that would be joining some of our projects. After hearing some concerns about these new linguists (Waze_x team) making changes to the translations, we would like to clarify some matters with you, since we truly believe that transparency and collaboration with our community is a core value at Waze.

Due to the rapidly moving Carpool launches and the fact that part of the success of Carpool relies on people making a major behavior change, we have had to put a lot more focus on how our UI looks and is understood by Wazers and Carpoolers. Due to recent analysis provided by the Waze Product team and after careful consideration with the Product team, it was determined that we need to bring the same level of quality to translations, as we have in the map. This is a huge project just like the Map quality one, which is a great success thanks to our team of dedicated community of map editors, constantly improving the map quality.

The focus on translation quality is a very new project so we need to proceed carefully and come up with an optimal process to combine high quality, fun, and collaboration in order to achieve the best possible outcome for you and your fellow Wazers.

Our aim is not to push you out in any way, on the contrary, we appreciate everything that you do for Waze and see great value in your huge contribution, in fact, we need you today more than ever! While professional linguists may know how to translate words, you guys know the product better than anyone else. We would potentially like to see you working together, with the professional linguists, if that’s something you are open to, by reviewing their work, providing them context, letting them know when you think they are incorrect and discussing, together with them, what is the best way to translate a certain string, only to achieve the highest level of quality. We would like to offer the professional linguists as a resource for all of you, and we see an opportunity to create something very unique in the field of crowd-sourced translations. We believe that with your help Waze could become the leader in providing crowd-sourced translations.

As always, we truly appreciate your dedication and precious feedback, and we would love to hear your thoughts about this change and what would be the best way to go about this. In the meantime we are working on building a plan that will foster deep collaboration between our Localization community and our professional dedicated Waze linguists. If you are interested in joining a task force to help us build this plan out please let us know by filling out this form, and we will schedule a webinar, in the next month to share updates.

Thank you