Jono: Localization of Wiki Entries Discussion

[Matthew East]

On Mon, February 26, 2007 4:27 pm, Martin Albisetti wrote:
> I agree with both Melissa and Efrain, when documentation (rules?)
> available on the wiki is only in english, other users get left out,
> subsequently forming their own set of rules (I have this specific
> problem with my LoCo).

I don't think there is any disagreement at all on this thread about that
:) My response to the original post was simply that as far as that post
implied that there were "non-English speaking teams", it was
inappropriate; because all local teams must have a team contact, who by
the nature of the job must be able to speak English.

As everyone in this thread has recognised (including me) there is material
among those pages which can usefully be brought to participants in the
various local communities. The question is the best way to do that. I
think that local teams should be encouraged to put this material on their
websites because these are the focus point of the local communities'
activities; and is usually the first place that users will go to
participate in loco based activities (for example, in the case of Italian,
if I type "Ubuntu italiano/italy/italia" or "Ubuntu contribuire" into
www.google.it, the Italian loco site is the first entry). These sites are
prominently linked from the main Ubuntu website as well as the front page
of the development wiki and I'd suggest that a similar approach can work
for other pages too.

There is one point that has been raised that I don't really understand -
the idea that keeping translations in the main wiki will make it easier to
update them. That's not the case: regardless of where the translation is
kept it will still have to be updated when the original changes, and the
amount of work involved in that updating process is the same regardless of
what translation method is used.

> I also agree completely that many times this gets translated anyway
> and put on LoCo's websites (we did this with the CoC), and efforts are
> duplicated (so did other spanish speaking LoCo's).

There is no need to duplicate such efforts - teams which share the same
language should already be collaborating on translation efforts of all
types, and it's sufficient simply to include any such initiative in such
collaborations.

Matt
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http://www.mdke.org
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