We’ve always been a global community, but the question of how to truly internationalize Symphony’s presence on the web is nevertheless a difficult one. What should be translated? How should it be managed? It’s a balancing act, trying to achieve openness without fragmentation, inclusiveness without confusion.
Nevertheless, spurred on by avid Symphonists eager to promote Symphony in languages like Portuguese and Russian, and with the help of some of the folks at Symposium 2010, we’ve begun formulating a plan that we hope will enable us to offer language-specific resources without diluting or undermining what I think we’d all agree is one of the best open source communities around.
The Plan
Language Landing Pages
In its earliest phases, the plan is actually quite simple. We will build into the Symphony site the ability to generate very basic, localized landing pages. These pages will not replicate the Symphony home page, but instead just briefly introduce Symphony to speakers of a particular language, link to any resources available in that language, and offer a disclaimer that certain resources are only available in English (e.g. the forum, the showcase, extensions, and so on). These pages will be templated, and just how much customization should be allowed is not yet clear.
Documentation
The landing pages will at least give us a basic presence in languages other than English. After that, the plan is to build into the site an interface for community members to translate documentation. This is a bit tricky though, because it will involve an editorial workflow and version control on two axes—revisions and translations. Once that’s all sorted, though, community members could take it upon themselves to translate docs, and those would get linked from the landing page for that language.
External Resources
Finally, if particular language communities wanted to develop independent Symphony-related resources (a networking site, for example, or a site for a country-specific meetup group), we’ll be happy to support those efforts as long as the site does not directly replicate any of the main site’s core functionality. In other words, we don’t want things like showcases, forums, and extensions splintered across dozens of sites. But if the German community wants to build a networking site for Symphony developers to share references and opportunities specific to Germany, that’s great. We will do our best to support such efforts—at the very least by linking to them from that language’s landing page, but in the future possibly by offering hosting or other resources.
What We Need
- We need you, our users, to tell us if this plan makes sense. Especially those of you who, like Rainer Borene or Igor Bogdanov, have already begun taking steps to promote Symphony locally.
- We’ll need help figuring out how to manage translations editorially. So give us your ideas.
- If there are ways to accommodate non-English users that we’ve failed to consider, please do let us know.
Thanks all.
Comments
As I already said in London I really like the idea of landing pages. It seems to be an easy way to provide basic international information. I think of URLs like de.getsymphony.com in this context.
The idea of local networks is related to this idea in my opinion. While the landing pages offer localized overviews for new users, network pages could be used to connect the local development community (who is using Symphony in that country) providing a way to organize local meet-ups. These sites should never recreate the main site and so I think it would be great if they could be hosted under an official domain, e. g. de.symphony-network.com. (This does not mean that Symphony has to host these sites but I think Symphony should own all official domains)
One thing that would be great for the landing pages are localized downloads of the core. Either providing a download of Symphony with the needed language extension integrated or giving a link to this extension to point out that a translation of the system is available.
Speaking of the documentation I’m not really sure about the workflow but maybe it’s an idea to build a frontend edting system for this that highlights new, changed or untranslated parts of the documentation.
Sounds like a good plan to me, and so do the ideas that Nils mentioned in his comment.
That would be great! I’m really interested in translating docs and articles and I’d like very much to help you out. :)
I think Nils is right here. His idea should be part of a broader plan to provide a package builder for each extension that has been translated in different languages other than English.
Agreed. Love this idea.
Sounds good to me, too.
And I like the idea of an official Symphony Network domain owned by but not necessarily hosted by Symphony as suggested by Nils. A Network Ensemble could be created to get some kind of generalized starting point, if needed.
Maybe a collaborative translation service like String could be used for the translation of the documentation. They have an API so it could be directly integrated in the documentation.
I also appreciate your idea of language specific landing pages. They are much easier to maintain in the long run.
We’ve implemented the exact same thing on our (by comparison tiny little) company website, even though in this case, German is the base language.
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