Re: Multi-language to be or not to be

Magnus Hagander a écrit :
> Josh Berkus wrote:
>> Magnus,
>>
>> I have to say "I told you so". When the existing translation scheme was
>> built two+ years ago, I pointed out that it was cumbersome, confusing and
>> inaccessable and predicted that none of our non-English communities would use
>> it.
>
> Nah, you can't say "i told you so", because I wasn't around the webteam
> when that was built :-P
>

And I didn't say it was confusing. It seems pretty simple to me.

>> So, my vote is that whether or not we have *an* translation infrastructure,
>> the current incomplete and non-standard infrastructure be junked. It's never
>> going to be used in its current form.
>
> ok.
> If we're doing this, we should definitely decide so *before* the French
> and German guys who just said they might do it get started.
>

I can wait :) I have enough things to do actually : a paper on
PostgreSQL 8.2, some slides (a neat idea from Devrim and Magnus :) ),
some more documentation-oriented stuff.

> So perhaps the deal is junk what we have now, and then think hard about
> how it should *really* work? With proper input from the people who are
> actually going to use it?
>
>
>> Further, we're going to have to expect that some language communities will
>> never translate the main site, since that puts them in a position of having
>> all new content generated in English and just having their site mirror that
>> without the ability to add new content originating in their group. And I
>> don't think that most of our language groups are large enough to sustain both
>> organizing content for their site and keeping translations of the English
>> site updated.
>
> That was what I thought originally in this thread. Seems at least the
> French community disagrees with us.
>

You're right. As far as I can say, we can do it. But we are one
community beyond many others. I would really like to know what others
thought about this. Do someone know how many local PostgreSQL
communities exist ?

And I don't think we should keep code for only one community.

>> P.S. Josh D, you are absolutely wrong about our language composition. The
>> majority of our community speaks a first language other than English, and at
>> least half of the non-English speakers aren't fluent in English. There are
>> large communities in Brazil, Spanish-speaking South America, Italy and
>> Germany -- as well as Japan -- which you aren't aware of because they don't
>> join the English-speaking MLs for obvious reasons. When I used to answer
>> webmaster@, for example, I got *more* questions in Portuguese than in
>> English.
>>
>
> Right. In case you didn't noticed, we added some google analytics stuff
> to the website (because it was the easiest way) and will be collecting
> some visitor statistics over the next couple of days - wrt where in the
> world people are coming from, and what languages their browsers are
> configured for.
>

Having a booth at Solutions Linux is really a great thing. We can get in
touch with people who use PostgreSQL but don't use mailing lists, people
who are not members of the association. They really use the french
translation, mostly because they aren't fluent in english. Really a lot
more people than what I thought. They are technical people but they
really need a translation. So, yes, I still think we would make use of a
translated www.postgresql.org website.

--
Guillaume.
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