Localized help.ubuntu.com blueprint

[Tom Davies]

Hi :)

It does make it difficult to point people to help in their own language from the Answers Team. Would it be possible to use redirects to do a relevant search of the LoCo Teams page. For example 
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Antivirus 
gives the English page but
https://help.ubuntu.com/community-it/Antivirus or better still
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/it/Antivirus (for greater consistency)
would take us to the Italian LoCo help guide, with their search feature already filled in with "Antivirus"

I am not sure how difficult it would be to set-up a general rule like that nor how much space it would take up on the server. Ideally i guess it would be nice for some of the pages to gradually get replaced with direct links to the exact right page but i can image that would quickly get very confusing and easily broken or create bad restrictions. Hopefully the general rule idea might be quite light and easy to set-up? Does anyone know if something like that might be easily feasible?

Regards from
Tom :)






________________________________
From: David Planella <david.planella at ubuntu.com>
To: Ubuntu Doc <ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com>
Cc: Ubuntu translators <ubuntu-translators at lists.ubuntu.com>
Sent: Mon, 10 May, 2010 14:53:40
Subject: Re: Localized help.ubuntu.com blueprint

El dg 09 de 05 de 2010 a les 14:14 +0100, en/na Matthew East va
escriure:
> Hi David,
> 
> 2010/5/7 David Planella <david.planella at ubuntu.com>:
> 
> [ref] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-m-localized-help-dot-ubuntu-dot-com
> 
> > I'd still like to discuss this at UDS, and I'd like to ask you to
> > reconsider it being superseded and participate in the discussion, be it
> > during the session, or afterwards on the mailing list (I'm fully aware
> > that UDS being during the week and on work hours makes it impossible for
> > everyone to participate). This is something the translations teams keep
> > me asking every cycle: if help.ubuntu.com has got the infrastructure to
> > support localization, why duplicate this for each LoCo?
> 
> I have no problem with a session at UDS to discuss this. I won't be
> able to participate in the discussion because UDS falls during my
> working day, but I am also happy to continue discussing it over email
> and I agree that it can and should be a public discussion and on a
> mailing list. I'm copying the ubuntu-doc and ubuntu-translators list
> to this email.
> 
> I'll give you my views as they are at the moment. My main reasoning
> not to support localisation on help.ubuntu.com is to promote
> consistency and to avoid localised resources appearing in different
> places, causing confusion for users.
> 
> The main Ubuntu website is not localised. As you know, we encourage
> local teams to provide information about Ubuntu and resources on
> specific websites, and for most languages such websites exist. Many,
> many teams also provide support resources through that website by way
> of forums and documentation. This means that users speaking different
> languages can easily find information about Ubuntu in their language
> in a dedicated website, which then becomes the home for Ubuntu
> resources in a particular language (e.g. www.ubuntu-it.org,
> forum.ubuntu-it.org, help.ubuntu-it.org, etc).
> 
> If we provided localised documentation on help.ubuntu.com, that would
> mean fragmentation for localised resources, because some resources
> would be on the specialised local team's website, and others on
> help.ubuntu.com. I don't think that is in the users' interest. It also
> means that the local teams wouldn't be able to customise the theme of
> the online documentation. It would also be very difficult as far as I
> can see to implement a system to make the header and footer of the
> webpages automatically localisable through Rosetta.
> 
> Furthermore, there would be fragmentation within help.ubuntu.com
> itself. The wiki area (at help.ubuntu.com/community) isn't translated,
> and I think it would be strange to have translated material in one
> part of the website, and not in another.
> 
> As you know, Chris is developing a system which will provide a banner
> which offers to guide users towards localised websites when they
> arrive at www.ubuntu.com. I don't see any reason why a similar system
> couldn't be put in place for help.ubuntu.com too.
> 
> In summary: I would encourage all translators and local teams to
> develop a documentation area within their existing localised websites.
> It's very easy to produce a localised version of help.ubuntu.com and I
> would be happy to work on improving the instructions for doing it
> (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/SystemDocumentation/BuildingDocumentation).
> Equally, I will merge any patches into the ubuntu-doc branch which
> make the process easier for local teams.
> 

Thanks Matthew for the detailed explanation on your views.

> If other people, particularly those working on local websites, have
> different views, I'm very open to hearing them.
> 

That was also another of my points, since the request comes mainly from
translators doing those translations and working within their LoCos to
make them available in the LoCo sites. I know the Finnish guys do,
Hungarian, Romanian, Catalan ... and I'm probably forgetting some.

We've got the session scheduled for tomorrow, so it would be very useful
to get some more feedback from translators before then to contemplate
all views.

Translators: could you tell us what you think?

Regards,
David.

-- 
David Planella
Ubuntu Translations Coordinator
david(dot)planella(at)ubuntu(dot)com
www.ubuntu.com


      
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