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 writing a series of interviews with contributors of all ranges. This week, meet Tantely Rabevohitra, one of our great translators!

Hi Tantely! First, could you tell us a bit about yourself?

I come from Madagascar, I arrived in France in 2003 to continue my studies, a master of research in Human-Computer Interaction and a master’s degree in Network and Information Systems. I got my first job in France as a Cobol developer in 2006 and, two years later, I moved on to software quality assurance, until today.

When and why did you get involved in contributing to the PrestaShop project? What motivates you?

I have always been interested in open source tools and applications. Also, I used to test a lot of open source software for my personal use. Half a year ago, I got involved in PrestaShop when I started to interest in e-commerce. Currently, e-commerce is not very common in Madagascar so I want to try and test if it can work here, and translating PrestaShop in Malagasy would definitely increase the chance to reach more users. In addition, I would like to learn about modules and themes development.

Do you have any advice for first-time PrestaShop contributors?

Contributing to Prestashop is the best and fastest way to learn how to use it. You can ask anything about PrestaShop to the community, there is always someone to answer you. If you encounter a problem, it is likely that another user has met the same issue before and thus you will be redirected to the solution. If not, someone else in the community will answer you - and this may help other users.

What’s the number one thing you’ve learnt by contributing to Open Source projects?

Because there are a lot of contributors all over the world in such a big open source project, you get help faster.

Thank you Tantely, we hope to see you more from you as PrestaShop evolves! :)