[Actionchix] New website and internationalization

[Clytie Siddall]

On 27/06/2006, at 4:10 PM, Mary Gardiner wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 27, 2006, Clytie Siddall wrote:
>> I've been following the website discussion with interest, and thought
>> it might be useful to mention our needs when translating websites
>> into other languages.
>
> I'm not able to comment on the technical aspects of this, it's likely
> you yourself will be better able to judge when a beta site is up and
> running.

OK. Happy to do so. I wasn't sure if this was the time to speak up,  
but would rather be early than late. ;)
>
> One social question though is: to what extent is it useful to  
> translate
> the LinuxChix pages? Certainly, some of our technical content such as
> courses would be useful in other languages. But our central  
> community is
> English speaking although several chapters operate in other languages.
> Are we intending to translate pages such as "how to join our mailing
> lists", and if so, what role will these translations play in our
> community?

In my experience, website translation is nearly always worthwhile,  
since it gets your information out to a much larger subset of the  
global population.

The fact that you devote resources to translation also gains you  
respect from those language communities. A central site like  
Linuxchix, on which chapters and lists are based, will attract a lot  
of search-engine and casual traffic. Having it translated means  
people can actually read what they find.

People coming to a site are looking for:

what is this about?
what is available to me?
how can I use it?

and I think a fair bit of the Linuxchix site answers these questions.
>
> We have had some discussion about making the linuxchix.org lists
> multilingual on occasion, there tends not to be consensus, both  
> because
> the demand is currently low and because we expect our moderators to
> enforce "be polite, be helpful" and it's difficult to do this when you
> can't read posts.
>
Multlingual lists are very difficult. If you have a viable group in  
any one language, it's more effective to run a parellel list in that  
language, e.g. in translation projects, there is a main i18n list  
where the language is English and the topics are general, and a list  
for each translation team where the language is theirs, and the  
topics usually relate specifically to that language and culture.

I think the Linuxchix topics are usually general, and although they  
could of course be discussed in other languages, it would make more  
sense to have other-lingual lists based on chapters for specific  
language, culture or national groups, when viable. Certainly, if I  
ever get together the personal resources, I would be very happy to  
run a Vietnamese Linuxchix list, based on a Vietnamese chapter.  
Active Linuxchix chapters in other countries already have their own  
discussions, even if they're not formal Linuxchix lists.

from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm  
Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN