Joined: May 31, 2003 Posts: 219 Location: French Alps
Posted: Wed Mar 02, 2005 4:57 am Post subject: "International" sub-section in the "Support&q
As I'm listed as the translator of the french Neo/J pages, I sometimes receive help request from French users.
This will probably happens more and more as Neo/J spreads.
I suggest we open a new Support->International subsection where non english speaking (writing!) users can ask and moreover search for answers.
This section will populates as questions arise, saving the effort of writing web of wiki pages if there are no readers.
A FAQ sticky thread in each contributed language should list more common questions which are not adressed on Planamesa pages.
First of all : Why my French (Italian, german...) dictionnary is not active on my Neo/J setup?
I concur that this is a good idea, especially as we have one of the most multilingual apps available on the Mac (we have localized UIs for a number of languages that Apple does not include on its default list of languages for submission in MPG, for instance). So this is a great way to show we respect the fact we are an international user community
My only "hesitation" about this is if we end up getting questions in the international forum in languages that no one speaks and the questions go unanswered/unread. That's a disservice to people who speak those languages.
I think it's pretty clear that we can handle French right now. Besides Max and lga, I know there are several other "forum members" who visit regularly who have a good command of French. I'm less clear on the extent of our coverage of other langauges....
So in addition to Max's proposed sticky FAQ in each language, perhaps there should also be a sticky noting which languages we have active support "personnel" to cover and suggesting if there is no response after a few days, try posting in the general (en) support forum? Or would this be off-putting?
Also, while Max has everyone's attention on international issues, I'd like to encourage our non-US and non-English readers/users to please make suggestions on the wiki's NeoAdvocacy page of sites where we should list Neo/J and sites we should send "press releases" for Neo/J 1.1 Final. And of course if anyone wants to volunteer to join the Community Relations team and help me handle all of the listings and news releases
Merci/Danke/Shukran/Gratias/etc.,
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: May 31, 2003 Posts: 219 Location: French Alps
Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2005 5:51 am Post subject:
sardisson wrote:
My only "hesitation" about this is if we end up getting questions in the international forum in languages that no one speaks and the questions go unanswered/unread. That's a disservice to people who speak those languages.
Anyway, this is the way to go. Even if nobody answers right away, someone can eventually cross by and reply. Then the knowledge base grows and any futur search can find this answer.
We know that some questions are asked when there are answer for years. As an exemple, for a recent question about using AddressBook content with NeoJ/OOo, I gave a workaround two years ago in OOdocs forum. Yoxi forwarded it (or found the hint by itself) to the poster. Would have it been there, a quick search...
IMO, we can expect some live threads in several european languages: French, German, Italian… and probably RTL languages: Hebrew, Arabic.
[quote= Anyway, this is the way to go. Even if nobody answers right away, someone can eventually cross by and reply. Then the knowledge base grows and any futur search can find this answer. Max[/quote]
Not only that, but it might help to extend the community among other languages' users.
I've started to slowly translate some of the docs into Spanish. When done I'll publisize NOJ among Mac User Groups in South America. If all goes according to plan, this should extend the user base over there and generate some traffic in Spanish over here.
It would be nice if them people could be directed to a page in Spanish. Hopefully, it would encourage them get more involved. And, at the very least, people like me could look and see if any query has already been solved in English and translate the answer.
cheers....el polo _________________ life is not fair -he said- but having root word helps
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Sat Aug 13, 2005 10:09 am Post subject:
I know the main trinity page (headlines, FAQs, etc.) can easily be done up to support multiple languages. The drag is that users need to explicitly choose their language from the popup to see that there is localized content. It may be possible to switch it automatically similar to how Patrick's autoconfiguration based on the browser info. I can't move the main neooffice.org page easily the same way Patrick's done his, but if I switch servers it can happen easily.
I'm a bit more unsure on the phpbb multiple language front or on the RSS feeds I've set up.
I know the main trinity page (headlines, FAQs, etc.) can easily be done up to support multiple languages.
I done it. But it only gets the start page.
What I reckon would be nice would be to have a specific thread in support or whatever in a given language. Perhaps even as sticky. Along the lines of "conversacion en castellano".
Just an idea to make it easier for non-English speakers to get on board...
cheers... el polo _________________ life is not fair -he said- but having root word helps
We'd also like to get all the content of the wiki translated. We have a French translation already underway (see this thread), but we're in a bit of a lull right now while some wiki-infrastructure upgrades are being done (so that everyone can choose his or her own language for the interface, and so that we can--hopefully--get some rewrite foo going so that the pages' titles will appear as "Accueil" rather than "Fr:Accueil" (which the wiki needs to have as the page url to know that a page is the equivalent of an English page)....
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Last edited by sardisson on Wed Sep 14, 2005 10:27 pm; edited 1 time in total
We'd also like to get all the content of the wiki translated.
That is a bit too much for me -at least for the moment- However, if all goes according to THE PLAN, there will be a spanish version of the wiki.
THE PLAN is simple: I am organising a web page (in Spanish) to promote open source and similar software down South America way. Hopefully, with a mirror for NOJ. At the moment I'm hoping to find someone (college or so) who will host it. If not, I'll pay for it.
The point is that in that site people will be asked to help to translate the apps documentation (and generally, encouraged to participate in the community) Hopefullly, anyone who dowload -say- NOJ will translate at least part of one document. Once they have been fully translated, they can be uploaded here (I already translated the FAQs and next will be "donations")
All that is partly due to some ideas which people has floated round here (in some threads) By instance, instead of waiting to see if the notion of the US 200 will be implemented, I can use that amount straight away (in the web site) which will hopefully produce more users and more donations.
Which reminds me: there is already a group called MacFloss. They are only a blogg and mail list (but have been considering the posibility of a portal) I'm sure at least some of them will be interested in this. _________________ life is not fair -he said- but having root word helps
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