An Open Source community is more than just PR made by faceless strangers. In order to better understand the people who contribute time and skills to the PrestaShop project, we’re launching a series of interviews with contributors of all ranges. This week, meet Alper Demir!

Hi Alper! Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Hi! I am a 36-year-old Industrial Engineer from Turkey, and my hobbies are DIY projects, Software Developing, Coding, and Project Improvements. I discovered PrestaShop while looking for a E-commerce solution that would best fit my working company’s needs.

How and when did you find out about the need for contributive translating?

When I install and started to use PrestaShop I see that current Turkish translations are mostly done by Machine translation services and I started to re-translate my installation, but every time I lost my translations after update or server faults. So finally, I decided to join to translation team in May 2016. Since then I do not know how many words I translated, but I think too much :) I spend approximately half of my spare time translating.

Why do you translate?

I do it to help my company, Turkish users of PrestaShop, and PrestaShop itself. I am an engineer, profit is not just related to myself. If my country’s e-commerce capabilities develop, then all the users will profit from this.

Why is it important for you to be active in open source translation?

If someone puts effort in developing something and sharing it freely, then some others should help to improve this. This is win-win relation.

What’s the number one thing you’ve learnt by contributing to the PrestaShop translation community?

Check it again & again. While you are translating a big project you have to get control over it. You have to check other sources, documents even your translations again. I learned that with some pain after I constrained to correct my mistakes. Translating is not easy, sometimes boring, requires attention but contributing is feeling good. ;)

Thanks you Martin, we hope to see you soon in our Crowdin Monthly reports! :)