Ubuntu 11.04 Translations Plans

[David Planella]

El dt 05 de 10 de 2010 a les 14:26 +0200, en/na Milo Casagrande va
escriure:
> 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?
> 

I think what the HoF needs is a bit of rework to make it easier for
community contributions, but Daniel Holbach will know more, and I'm sure
he'll appreciate some help. I'll forward your suggestion to him.

> >>  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.
> 

Contributing to the coordination and publishing of the translation
interviews is already open to the community, and in fact
community-driven. Amber Graner has been doing a rocking job in
coordinating the interviews for all teams. It is simply that there has
been a bit of delay in publishing the last ones, but as you've noticed
we're back on track :)

If anyone else wants to help with that, that would be really awesome.
Simply contact me or Amber (akgraner on IRC on the
#ubuntu-community-team or #ubuntu-news channels,
<akgraner(at)ubuntu(dot)com>).

The interview questions and the schedule are here:

https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AdKZelXU8Y2LZGNrcHRkYmhfMTA5ZmJ3dmp2ZnI&hl=en

In fact, a really easy way to help is that if you are a team coordinator
to send me or her the interview responses already, without having to
wait for being contacted.

> >> 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! ;-)
> 

It is not a secret, but it has not yet been moved to our servers. It
will be in a few days, and I expect there to be an announcement. I
prefer not to publish the URL for the temporary hosting, in order not to
spoil the surprise ;-)

> > 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.
> 

If you would like to participate in that, that'd be really cool. Your
experience in documentation and how to best present content to users
would be extremely valuable.

> 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;

I agree that, while doable, it is not easy to localize them, but I do
think that videos are extremely useful to quickly learn in a more visual
way about a particular subject, as a complement to written
documentation. Accessibility-wise, I'm not sure how well they work, so
I'd appreciate comments from anyone experienced in that area.

If we were to publish videos in the portal, I'd be wanting to provide
subtitles and to make it easy to localize them (there are several tools
available for converting subtitle captions to .pot, which we could
import into Launchpad).

>  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!
> 

Awesome, I think it's going to be a rocking session.

Regards,
David.

-- 
David Planella
Ubuntu Translations Coordinator
www.ubuntu.com / www.davidplanella.wordpress.com
www.identi.ca/dplanella / www.twitter.com/dplanella
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