Re: [Launchpad-users] Is translation of Launchpad itself planned?

[Barry Warsaw <barry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Dec 8, 2009, at 9:20 AM, Henning Eggers wrote:

>> Let's be as open-minded as the open-source world is in general and
>> realize that internationalization is something that people want. I
>> agree, that it has to be done right but saying "We don't want no foreign
>> speakers here" sounds very narrow-minded. Don't worry about Ubuntu not
>> being able to interface with them, they *do* have active Locos for a lot
>> of languages.

As much as my monolinguistic American biases might say otherwise, I do think it's ultimately beneficial for more of Launchpad to be usable for non-English speakers.  It should be up to the project to decide though.  This is analogous in my mind to the way Mailman allows list administrators to enable and disable languages for its own pages.  

Yes, it's true that as a cross-project developer there will be times you'll land on bug pages that you cannot understand, but that's life.  I've found that with a vibrant community, I can usually find someone to help translate an important issue or email.

I also think that forcing English-only is an uphill battle.  Heck, many programming languages allow for non-ascii identifiers now.  What would an English-only speaker do if she saw a merge proposal containing code with Japanese function names in it?

In the end analysis, the acceptable languages for a project, or even project-crossing community (e.g. Ubuntu or Launchpad) is a social problem.  For better or worse (well, better for me :) English is the common tongue in the open source world.  Someday it may be Chinese, and Launchpad will either adapt or find that a very large slice of open source developers ignore it.

If we decide to do this, then one thing that I think would help a lot would be for any user-entered artifact to be easily translated by other users, and for those translations to be easily accessible.  We (the Launchpad developers) can make it so you can read all of our text in multiple languages, but users will only enter comments in one language.  For comments not in English, I'd want to make it so that if I asked a community member to translate for me, it would be super simple for them to click on the comment and add a parallel comment (in a different language).  It should be obviously linked to the original, and it should again be super simple for me to click on and call up the English translation.

-Barry