Contributorship refers to indicating who did what in a project, going beyond a simple list of authors. In scholarly journal articles about a project, the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) has become a popular way to provide individual contribution information, often with accompanying machine-readable metadata. While CRediT is used by hundreds of scientific journals, the official version of CRediT exists only in English. To support scientific publishers and researchers writing in other languages, we have created translations of the fourteen CRediT roles and their descriptions into thirty-six languages. To ensure high quality, at least one speaker fluent in the target language drafted the translation, with additional involvement of a second fluent person. Because hundreds of scientific journals publish non-English work, the use of our translations could improve the recognition of the associated researchers’ contributions. We have contacted relevant publishers and academic organizations to make them more aware of CRediT, of our translations, and of contributorship generally. To conclude, we discuss the potential for CRediT and other ontologies to be applied more broadly, for example to facilitate greater recognition of people who are not co-authors but are named in Acknowledgments sections.