The Translating Foldit page on the wiki has been updated.
The existing process outlined on the page still works. It's based on the gettext format.
Basically, there's a template file, foldit.pot, which contains all the messages to be translated. Software like Poedit can make the process a little easier, but any editor which supports UTF-8 could be used.
The foldit.pot file contains pairs of "msgid" and "msgstr" keywords. The idea to translate the value of "msgid", and put the result in the value of "msgstr".
The are some special values derived from the C language, like "\n" for newline, and the placeholders "%s" for a character string, and "%d" for a number.
The result is file with the .po extension, such as foldit.ru.po for the Russian translation. The .po file can be uploaded to the Foldit website. There's also a process for testing a translation, but some further research is needed on that.
There are over 850 messages in the current foldit.pot, but they are pretty repetitive. Words like "sheet", "helix", "bond", "band", and so on appear in many messages.
The crowdsourcing idea sounds great, but we'd probably need to figure out a way to graft it on to the existing translation process.
Also, there seem to be some underlying issues blocking translations for Chinese and other non-European languages. Fixing these issues would require changes to Foldit itself, but evidently these changes aren't easy. Unfortunately, the game is not open source, although many have suggested it should be. So it's doubtful that these problems will get fixed anytime soon.
