[haiku] Re: Supporting web content in non-English languages

  • From: "Jorge G. Mare" <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:25:26 -0800

Jorge G. Mare wrote:
Howdy,

Many messages, so will try to reply all in one. Hope you don't mind.

# About being premature and raising false expectations

From the perspective of being premature and potentially raising false
expectations, having some localized web content mainly for information
purposes should be no different from having a the multilingual user
guide (which we do). So I don't see how such argument can hold water.

To make it clear whether any given release of Haiku is English-only or
partially/fully localized, we can simply add a notice to the translated
download page, and that should do it.

# Concerns about content outdated/out of sync

This is a valid concern for content that changes constantly; but if you
look at the pages under the About and Community sections, that is not
the case. If anything, this would be more like a one-time translation
job with very occasional updates thereafter; this is nothing that the
translation teams which have formed thanks to the Haiku User Guide
translation initiative couldn't handle.

With regards to the English version still needing some work/
simplification/reorganisation, I suppose this is referring to the
documentation area. However, I think the pages under the About and
Community sections are in pretty good shape, and that alone could be a
good starting point.

# Intl. Forums: are they necessary?

It is the forums that were created for very niche purposes by a small
group of people -- ie., "Creative Design" forum (openbeos-cdt team),
"Marketing" forum (mea culpa) and the "Team Haiku Distributed Computing"
forum (third party project?) -- that show little to no activity.

Forums that have a wider scope -- as it would be the case for a single
general language-specific forum -- are much less likely to suffer from
lack of activity, much less if you consider the future potential for the
growth of their audience.

But what's more important is that giving non-English speakers a place to
gather and interact within the realms of the project will help build the
community by fostering a sense of participation (rather than isolation).
We have a lot of multilingual people in the project, and they could act
as bridges that could lead to healthy cross-polination between the core
members of the project and the non-English speakers.

# Mailing lists + forums: why the duplication?

I hear the argument that having both forums and mailing lists is
unnecessary duplication, and while in theory I can agree with this, the
reality is that some people prefer one medium over the other, and you
need to cater to both (which we already do, btw).

# Mixed-language content concerns

Drupal is language-aware throughout, so this is a non-issue.

Hopefully I covered all the concerns, but feel free to ask if anything
is not clear.

Sorry for quoting myself (which I am doing as a way of a gentle reminder), but I have not heard anything about the clarifications that I gave to the concerns expressed about adding some localized content to the website.

Does this mean that all the concerns were addressed and I can move ahead? Or are there any remaining issues that anyone would like to discuss?

Cheers,

Jorge/aka Koki



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