Localisation of help.ubuntu.com

[Kenneth Nielsen]

Hallo

I whole-heartedly agree with this idea and the arguments presented by
Andrej. As a translator I'm always looking for ways to ensure that my
work remains relevant and benefits many people. Letting localized
documentation be a translation of the official English documentation
will increase quality, ensure that it is kept up-to-date and decrease
duplicate work, that's a win-win-win kind of thing.

To improve the user experience I would furthermore impose a
restriction, such that only languages where more than 95-98% percent
of the documentation is localized is discoverable on the website.

The only possible problem I can think of with this idea (besides the
work involved in making the website localizable) is if Canonical wants
to have some way to ensure a certain quality of the documentation
(including the localizations), since if the work is based purely on
volunteers there really is no way to ensure that. It is the same
problem faced right now with the translation of Ubuntu Pay.

Regards Kenneth Nieslen (TLE)

2011/5/5 Andrej Znidarsic <andrej.znidarsic at gmail.com>:
> Hello!
> Yesterday I wrote a short email why having a localised help.ubuntu.com is a
> good idea.
> I have been talking to David Planella on IRC and realised I didn't
> understand how localised help.ubuntu.com is supposed to work at the time.
> Now i realised it has many more advantages as I thought.
> So I decided (in absence of other replies) to write a bit longer argument
> why i believe localisable help.ubuntu.com is a great idea for loco teams. ;)
> Now i know the same strings are used both for help in ubuntu (software) and
> help on help.ubuntu.com. This means that translation teams don't have to do
> any extra work to have a localised help.ubuntu.com and greatly decreases
> amount of work required to have a translated online help.
> Many teams (including Slovenian Loco team) occasionaly experience a decrease
> in activity and hence aren't able to update documentation on wiki (this is
> now much more noticeable when unity is here). Even if teams have enough
> contributors I believe community documentation is of inherently lower
> quality. Firstly it's difficult not to miss something out, and docs team IMO
> does better work at this since it's more structured/organized than most of
> local documentation teams.
> In additon most users who edit local wikis are close to normal users and are
> not in contact with the developers as much as the docs team. This means
> editors of local wikis are not familiar with all the changes between relases
> and need to discover them theirselves (most often after stable release).
> This meanes some minor changes or features are only found at a later time or
> not at all (especially minor changes such as changed menus or options
> somewhere deep in a menu for example). Therefore local community based
> documentation will be always less complete and/or updated at a later time.
> This can be very important as most users tend to try ubuntu in the first few
> weeks after stable release and existing users usually read the documentation
> in the first few weeks after stable release too, to see what is new or to
> seek help with changed options/programs. So if the local docs teams
> functions ok, it will be slightly incomplete/out of date. I quickly checked
> a couple of local wikis. While I don't posess a linguistic knowledge to
> determine if the content is updated/good quality in my opinion about 10-20
> wikis in total has a significant amount of content.
> Another significant advantage of localised help.ubuntu.com (I realised this
> while tyring to determine how many local wikis are in good shape) is
> discoverability, since many new users are not aware of their local wikis.
> Usage of help.ubuntu.com allows having a link in the Firefox help menu or a
> link in the Firefox startup page for easy discoverability.
> In short having a localised help.ubuntu.com ensures better quality of the
> wiki, increases amount of wikis in good shape and significantly decreased
> the burden of maintainance of documentation and wiki infrastructure (maybe
> people who wrote localised help before can be encouraged to join the docs
> team). In addition help.ubuntu.com documentation can be easily discovered
> and used by end users.
> Is anyone else willing to share his/her opinion about pros and cons?
> regards
> Andrej
> --
> ubuntu-translators mailing list
> ubuntu-translators at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-translators
>
>