I'm in Taiwan with Keng-yü Lin <launchpad.net/~lexical> and he talked about the problems people have in dealing with Launchpad if they're not fluent in English.
We have a pretty nice feature by which people can ask questions in a language other than English and then get help from others who speak that language. To me this seems like a good way by which their questions can be captured and if they turn out to be a bug turned into an English bug report without putting that work onto every individual project. (Although it would be very nice if all of Launchpad was internationalized, we realize this would be a lot of work and anyhow would lead to bug trackers being full of reports the developers can't read.) However the problem is that, if you're not fluent in English, you can barely find this feature. That seems to be empirically confirmed by the small number of eg zh_TW questions. It seems to me that some fairly small steps might get much more user benefit out of what's already been done by the answers framework, by presenting just a couple of messages in the user's language. By "user's language" I mean either what's set in their account or what their browser requests, or maybe what their GeoIP specifies, or some combination. All these things would only be active if there are languages other than English. 1- On the Answers home page, put a link in their native language saying <<you can ask a question in Traditional Chinese on Ubuntu or any other Launchpad project>>. (This home page could use some 3.0 love too.) 2- On eg <https://answers.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+addquestion> present the "please ask a question" message in the user's language. 3- On the launchpad home page, put a little clip with something like <<Most of Launchpad is only available in English, but you can _ask a question in Traditional Chinese_ to get help or report a problem.>> (Similarly to the beta testers message.) (And for bonus points a 'shut up' button to remove it.) I was thinking we could repeat these short messages for every language for which we have a translation; to scale to people who've ticked every box we might need to cut it off after four or something. Keng-yu also mentions that if we do this, it will help us capture many more issues about i18n and l10n of Ubuntu, by giving us a better connection to the users most sensitive to it. -- Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/> _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
