launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Curtis Hovey <curtis.hovey@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 2009-08-16 at 13:48 +0800, Martin Pool wrote:
> 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.

This is a well understood issue:

https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/launchpad-answers/+spec/localized-support-tracker

The problem is larger than what this old blueprint implies. To ask a
question, the user needs to register in how own language, presumable his
profile page in in his language, and the entire answers application is
in his language.

This is hard, and without a team to work on it, we never committed to a
plan.

Answers does know the language of the question and shows them correctly
in listings (/me is not certain about portlets). Care was taken to mark
all the strings as translatable messages.

The 3.0 layout uses the lang and dir attributes a little differently
than the 1 and 2 layouts so that templates from other applications can
do less work to be internationalized.

-- 
__Curtis C. Hovey_________
http://launchpad.net/

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