Ubuntu 11.04 Translations Plans

[Milo Casagrande]

Hi David,

On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 20:06, David Planella <david.planella at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> El dv 17 de 09 de 2010 a les 12:06 +0200, en/na Milo Casagrande va
>>
>> Maybe, as a short-term goal, I was thinking about reaching out
>> translator teams, and ask them if they have story to share about how,
>> a translated version of Ubuntu, has helped people/companies/schools in
>> a particular way, something that a non-translated version couldn't
>> have achieved, and share their story on the Fridge, pointing out how
>> important is the translators work.
>
> I really like this idea, I think it would be good to start a coordinated
> effort to publish stories for each translation team. I'm planning to
> have a UDS session on this.

Good, looking forward to attend that session!

>
>>  We should probably try to have more
>> translators on the hall-of-fame,
>
> We haven't updated the Hall Of Fame for a while, so the status of the
> HoF is right now on hold, unless someone finds the time to step up and
> help maintaining it. That's the reason why we haven't been adding any
> rockstar contributors (be it in translation or in any area).

Hmmm... maybe we need to ask the community to help out with that:
having a small team of dedicated people that can maintain the HoF.
Will it be possible to open the maintainance of the HoF also to
community members?

>>  and start publishing more translators
>> interview.
>>
> We should be publishing the interviews monthly, but there seems to have
> been some delay in the last one. It's been hectic lately with the
> preparation of several OpenWeek, AppDeveloperWeek and such events, but
> I'll try to see if we can unblock it and start publishing the next batch
> of interviews.

I saw a new one on the Fridge yesterday, but again, like for the HoF,
maybe opening it up to other community members, maybe translators
members in this case, could help it a little bit.

>> I would really like to see a community-driven web portal where
>> translator groups (but not only them) can get together, a sort-of
>> Language Portal like Microsoft has, but better and open-source:
>> http://www.microsoft.com/Language/en-US/Default.aspx
>
> Despite all attempts to structure the contents on the Translations
> namespace and to simplify the main page so that people can easily find
> the info they need (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Translations/), the wiki has
> grown too big for being able to store all the content related to
> translations and present it to new users in a way that is both easy to
> use and attractive.
>
> I've been discussing this with Jono, and also looking at the awesome
> work my team mate Ahmed has been doing on a Cloud Portal, and I think it
> is the time for a Translations Portal.

Is this something that is already public? Just to take a peek at it...
If not, doesn't matter! ;-)

> The idea of the portal is to have a site on
> http://translations.ubuntu.com that can serve to aggregate and showcase
> the current content related to Ubuntu Translations with the main
> purposes of:
>
>      * Inspiring and getting new contributors excited about
>        translations
>      * Be used as a spring board for anyone to easily get started to
>        translating Ubuntu
>
> That is something which I would also like to focus on this cycle, and I
> would encourage anyone to give a hand to make the Ubuntu translations
> experience even more awesome.
>
> I find the suggestion of hosting a glossary and a discussion forum good
> ideas, but that is something that will require some development or
> infrastructure work. For the first phase, I'd like to focus on building
> a functional portal and aggregating some basic information: # News and
> announcements, Articles on translations, Translations quick start guide,
> Links to reference documentation on the wiki, Microblogging,
> Presentation video, Videos on how to get started with translations, etc.
>
> I'll also be adding a UDS session for that.
>
> What do you think?

Totally agree with you on the basic features at the beginning: more
advanced features (glossary, vocabulary or whatever pop-ups in our
minds) could be developed as time passes by, and we better understand
where we should focus our strengths. If this is going to be more a
community-driven effort, one or two advanced features per release
cycle could be a good goal (based also on the number of people
involved and the difficulty of the tasks).

I personally think the wiki is getting more difficult to maintain, and
information is getting buried under a lot of click-paths. The supposed
translation portal should go under a thorough content strategy and
restructure.

I'm not very fond of videos, but that's me. I tend to think that to
have a good quality video is not easy, and also it's not easy to
localize them (as long as we don't provide closed captionings; we can
maybe argue that it's a translators portal and people should be
accostumed using Elnglish, but translators are proud to have as much
as they can translated in their language :-)

Really looking forward to discuss this at UDS!

Ciao.

-- 
Milo Casagrande <milo at casagrande.name>