On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:07 AM, Samer Mansour <[email protected]> wrote: > In communicating with Rob Weir earlier today about the google experiment > for integration of social media, he mentioned we were maintaining separate > pages for other languages. > > One of the challenges in maintaining separate pages is making sure content > such as announcements are translated and communicated to the users in those > locales. > If missed, a segment of our users could be left out for important > information about the AOO project. > > I'm proposing I find a translation solution with the following scope: > - To make our communication and announcements more uniform. eg. Home page > and download page. > - To make all our oo.org pages available to all users in their local > language. eg.http://www.openoffice.org/why/ > - Make our lives easier when we roll out a branding refresh / template. > > Here is a wiki page where I placed two solutions down: > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/AOO4+-+Websites+Translation > Language specific pages could be replaced with a redirection to the new > solution until Google other search engines pick it up. >
It might be possible to do a hybrid approach also, where some languages have manually authored translations, in cases where we have active volunteers, and other rely on machine translation via Google. The manual translations require more work, but also would be higher quality. It is reasonable to think that for every language we have a mini-site, e.g., fr.openoffice.org that contains at least: 1) Homepage. 2) /why/ pages 3) /download/ pages 4) /product/ pages 5) One or more special pages for that language. For example, the Arabic page might have a page describing the support for RTL (bidi) features. The Japanese page might have a special page on support of "ruby" annotations. Other languages might have a special page on spell checkers, grammar checkers, etc. There could also be pages on local marketing activities, user groups, online forums, etc., that serve that community. How we treat the site-wide announcements would require some thinking as well. And in some cases there might be announcements that apply to only some language pages, e.g., a local conference. -Rob > One based on Google Translate, I've seen it on a commercial site and it was > really good, only if I remembered what company it was again. > The other is based on using our Pootle instance as translation repository. > This might require more initial work but could be more customizable and in > our control. > > Samer
