launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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/>