Localisation of help.ubuntu.com

[Tom Davies]

Hi :)


At the moment it is difficult to point people to documentation without doing 
quite a bit of research and understanding the language of the person asking.  


It would be nice to be able to find good pages in my own language and then just 
add a language code into their url.  Obviously this would not always point to 
exactly the right page but it could at least redirect to the 
front-page/home-page of the 'local' teams website.  Alternatively it would be 
nice if all pages had flags or something at the top so that people could click 
on them to be redirected to a website in the right language.

For example for the page
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BurningIsoHowto
There  could be a 
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/fr/BurningIsoHowto
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ru/BurningIsoHowto
That would ideally go to the French or Russian documentation websites and add 
the search parameter "BurningIsoHowto".  While that would be the general-case 
there might be some possibility of having certain pages go directly to the 
relevant page in that local team's documentation
http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org//tutoriel/graver_cd_ubuntu_depuis_windows?redirect=3
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/iso-%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%8C

For 'local' languages that  don't have their own website it might be possible 
for them to have "home pages" such as 

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/fr

When i used to answer a lot of questions in Launchpad answers i would often see 
questions in non-'english' go unanswered until after i contacted the translators 
team and specifically ask them to help direct the person to the correct local 
language answers team.  The translators team were superb and often seemed to 
just answer the question and deal with follow-up.  


While Machine Translators such as "IM Translate" might make just about enough 
sense into an Answerers language they tend to be completely hopeless at  
translating to a language the Answerer doesn't grok.  


It would be nice to be able to signpost people quickly and easily to somewhere 
more useful without having to call in people from other teams potentially 
causing them distress.

Regards from
Tom :)
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