On Thu, Oct 26, 2023 at 10:42 AM Christofer Dutz <christofer.d...@c-ware.de> wrote: > > Hi all, > > as some of you might know, I recently joined a company where most employees > are native Chinese speakers. > I was looking forward to this for the reason of gaining more insight into how > these communities work and was hoping to gain some actionable things to help > make the ASF more welcoming to these communities. > > Yes: Many of us say: English is the most spoken and understood language on > the planet. > However even if someone might understand English and might be able to write > English, they still might not feel comfortable doing so. > In the PLC4X project we have one person who stated that on multiple occasions > and he’s a valuable part of the community. > > It seems that our way of writing English emails, even if accessible to > communities in China, still it causes them to build up parallel structures: > > * WeChat Groups > * Workspaces using tools like Lark/Feishu > > I was always trying to convince them to come and have discussions on > mailing-lists but have generally failed to do so. > > Now after starting to work at Timecho, I got used to using their chat tool > (Feishu) … it’s sort of like Teams combined with Office 365. > But the feature that struck me most, was the ability that I could select any > channel and enable the “Translation assistant”. Here I could select which > language I want to read the discussions in, and I can even have the assistant > auto-translate everything to Chinese. This way I can communicate with my > colleagues as if I was communicating with native English speakers. It’s been > nothing but amazing to see how easy it is to simply ignore language barriers > and focus on the task at hand and not having to deal with writing in a > non-native language (Well … I think I would be 100% lost, if someone asked me > to write in Chinese ;-) ) > > This got me thinking: > We have this rule: If it didn’t happen on the list, it didn’t happen (Don’t > even know if it’s really written down somewhere or if it’s just a common > mantra). > But I think this is just one instance of a solution to the problem of us > wanting to have every decision documented and archived and searchable, so > everyone can participate and later search for reasons why a project did what > they did. > So … what if we question this rule. > I was thinking of if we couldn’t achieve what the rule wanted, by introducing > a new solution into the picture. > What if we had a global storage for everything that happens in a project? > Every input to the project is stored in this system. This input could be in > any language. > If we had a sponsor to allow auto-translating things to English (I am sure > there are services out there able to do that) > A translated English version could be stored alongside the original. > Now every system we use, could have plugins to send to this central system: > Email, GitHub, Jira, Slack, WeChat, … > If someone could now use this system to follow everything that a project is > doing, possibly using the translation API to have things converted into the > language he can understand. > > I think (except for the translation service), we should have everything we > need inside the foundation. > > What do you folks think?
Yes, and... ;-) ...I've been thinking along the same lines given that I have recently helped OpenAtom Foundation get to a point where they have native translations/explanations of portions from https://www.apache.org/legal/ The translations are done and have been reviewed by two of our long standing, bi-lingual ASF members. So they are as good as it gets. Now, the question I have is: how can we promote this to our communities who may benefit from it? The reason I'm asking is not to hijack this thread ;-) but rather to figure out what would be our attitude towards non-english content (like what you're suggesting Chris). Would we be comfortable putting it some place on apache.org ? Would a better option be simply linking to some other resource? Would a parallel, web property managed by folks affiliated with ASF, but not officially ASF be a better option? But to get back to Chris' question: my answer would be "YES -- let's collect all things that can be helpful (regardless of the language)", but my followup question would be: how should we manage/expose/promote it? Thanks, Roman. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org
