Thank you Manuelt15 for comments. Assuming problem is the greeting this is
another attempt at the e-mail posted on 22.1.11, 26.1.11 and 28.1.11 but not
archived.
>From my point
of view the translation of the fundraiser 2010 was a very frustrating and
disappointing experience. Despite my best efforts we did not receive a
completely translated central banner in Welsh and clicking on the central
banner never took us to the Welsh language version of the donation landing
page, at least for the vast majority of cy users, those living in the UK.
To describe in detail:
Translation links for translators
This year you decided not to include translation links from the central notice
to meta because this was drawing people away from the donation link. I'm not
taking issue with that decision. As you
know the disadvantage of this is that potential translators do not know where
to translate, which is potentially aggravating for those users (of which more
below). One way of mitigating this difficulty would have been to post on the
community page an invitation and link to the translation tab of the Fundraiser
2010 hub, specifically inviting users to translate, when the campaign went
permanently live. Assuming that the central banner will lack the translation
links next year too I recommend you do this next year.
The link to the fundraiser translation which was included as a banner on meta
was very useful by the way - please can we have this next year too.
i-10n issues
It does not appear that i-10n issues were considered during the preparation and
testing of the fundraiser either at Wikimedia Foundation or at any of the
chapters. Each chapter had its own landing pages with its own messages. No
mechanism was put in place to allow all
language wikis within the geographical area of the chapter to localise these
chapter-specific messages. It was only when this issue was raised by the wikis
affected that this was addressed. Casey brown set up some translated pages for
individual combinations of language/chapter, at their request. This was done on
an ad hoc basis, it being down to each language wiki to understand the problem
and request action. This issue was discussed on the l-translators list but not
all translators subscribe to the list (especially not those who are first-time
translators at meta). I requested that somebody who knew the ins and outs of
this issue write some general advice about this on meta itself. I was
disappointed that my request was not answered.
I recommend that when further action is needed by translators, to get their
translations applied, then notes about this should be posted where we are
likely to see them - such as on the relevant translation pages
at meta.
Image format
After having translated various messages specific to Wikimedia UK and Casey
Brown having published them it was still not possible to see them because of a
technical issue with the banner, apparently caused by its being done as an
image on Wikimedia UK. As I understand it the image format performed better
during the testing and so was chosen. No consideration whatsoever had been
given to the issue of localisation of image formats.
Unfortunately it appears that there was only one person at WikiMedia UK who was
in a position to create the correct banner images with 'Read Now' localised and
linking to the localised WikiMedia UK landing pages. This one person was
unfortunately too busy to do this as I understand it. I had hoped that we would
get this done by Christmas but it never was done. I am quite disappointed that
my last e-mail of concerning this has still not been answered, leaving me still
in the dark to
some extent. In any case he would have had to attend to each language
individually, meaning that only those languages requesting this would have been
able to be fixed.
Please make sure that you use localisable formats in future.
Disregard of non-state language wikis
I guess that the amount of money that you could raise from the wikis of
non-state languages is usually small so from the point of view of an efficient
fund-raiser all this is unimportant. But from my point of view fundraiser
central notices appearing wholly or partly in a language which is not the wiki
language are counter-productive. Rather than encouraging users to donate they
discourage donation. You did not receive a donation from me this year, as I was
waiting to be able to do this via the central banner.
Worse than that however is that these central notices appearing in English or
state languages are intrusive and alienating, and in my opinion damage
these wikis. It creates a them and us mentality, reinforcing the view that the
users of these wikis do not 'own' them. Usually central notices are translated
quickly by me to avoid any appearing in English. It was very frustrating to do
many hours of work on the fundraiser, only for most of it not to appear via the
central banner. The whole experience was very discouraging.
Next year
I write all the above in the hope that next year's fundraiser can be improved.
I realise that all involved, volunteers and paid staff, are working under a lot
of pressure and that there was no intention to aggravate the readers and
translators of the smaller wikis. Some of the smaller wikis do not have enough
manpower to translate all the stuff produced by WMF, either in a timely
fashion, or at all. It was a shame that technical issues prevented the hard
work of those of us who did translate the fundraiser from being put to use.
Since I
know that I was not the only person who had difficulties this year I am
copying this message to the translators-l list.
Regards,
Eleri James (Lloffiwr), Wales
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