Added the guidelines-de folder to the 8.8 branch, and removed it untill we discussed this here.

It isn't 100% translated by now. I read through and I think the guidelines are very valuable. Is it possible to add the folder to the guideline output script so that translators, reviewers, and other folks can read the guidelines in their native language for convenience, please?

Comments

Joachim Namyslo created an issue. See original summary.

Joachim Namyslo’s picture

Joachim Namyslo
Primary language German
Location Kulmbach 🇩🇪 🇪🇺
CreditAttribution: Joachim Namyslo as a volunteer and commented
Title: added guidlines-de to enable people to review translations » Adding guidlines-de to enable people to review translations.
Issue summary: View changes
jhodgdon’s picture

jhodgdon
she/her
Primary language English
CreditAttribution: jhodgdon commented

Let's discuss this here... Don't delete the directory yet!

So there are several things to think about:

  1. Having this one translation in the Git repository is not a huge problem -- it is only a few files and not many images.
  2. The structure of the repository for this is not good right now, because it should be structured like the source directory with languages underneath if we are going to do translations for other languages. So it should be guidelines/en and guidelines/de etc. But it will break things if we change the structure to have languages under guidelines at this point.
  3. Another concern is getting it displayed on drupal.org. If we restructured the Contributor Guide to have translations, the URLs for the existing pages in English would have to change, and that is not good because we have a lot of links. Also the process and scripts right now do not consider Guidelines to have languages, so they would need to be updated.
  4. Which parts of the Guidelines document do you really need to have translated? A lot of it is about the initial writing and structure of the topics, and about English grammar issues, which should not be needed by translators...
  5. Are there really very many people who would work on the German or other translations, who do not read English? It seems like you would need to be able to read English in order to work on the translations?
Joachim Namyslo’s picture

Joachim Namyslo
Primary language German
Location Kulmbach 🇩🇪 🇪🇺
CreditAttribution: Joachim Namyslo as a volunteer and commented

Agree with 1 - 3

Point 4

Seems to me the whole guidelines are valuable for reviewers, and proofreaders, too. You change your view if you know how the guid is intended. and wich personas are targeted with the guide. Therefore you do proofreading and participating in an other way.

5. I don't know if there are a lot of people willing to do this. What I can confirm is that there are a lot of people not willing or able to do initial translations at all. But there are a lot of people willing to improve translations if they have a draft version of a string that is part of the UI or the user guide, So it's all about knowing where there barriers are and trying to keep them as low as possible to make sure Translation is not the business of 4 or five people at all.

A good example of that is the project de itself.It has

1220 members
523 Contributions
and maybe 4 pr 5 people willing and able to do reviews and moderation, als well as translations from scratch.

So there should be much more guidance on how to get things done.

Ideally in there native language to make it as easy as possible to contribute for them.

Most people singed to translate Drupal into German are off since Drupal 8, because they do not know that digging in to how Drupal works and translating things like the user guide and help texts, too is a great way to learn Drupal at all.

So if we like to get more people on board there must be as much translated learning resources as possible. The user guide is such a resource.

I talked to some people today and they said, they are willing to do prove reading, but they don't understand Asciidoc-Syntax and are not willing to du translations from scratch. So The formatting is a good guide for such a person, It makes her/him able to do prove reading by using atom without producing malformed source-code. There are very good examples in this file.

  • Same goes to Guidlines-editing.txt
  • guidlines-images.txt
  • and phase-checklists.txt

With these guidelines it is possible to maintain the guide with more than one people even if not everybody able to translate anything form scratch.

I hope that more people will gather together and review and correct things much quicker if they have documentation stuff in they native language to correct and improve, because they don't need to do an initial translation to help out.

jhodgdon’s picture

jhodgdon
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Primary language English
CreditAttribution: jhodgdon commented

If you only need a very small part of the Guidelines, to explain people who might proofread where to go or how to get set up, perhaps you could post a page on the localize.drupal.org German group instead of needing to translate all of the Guidelines and get it deployed on drupal.org? Deploying things on drupal.org is complicated, time consuming...

eojthebrave’s picture

eojthebrave
he/him
Primary language English
Location Minneapolis, MN
CreditAttribution: eojthebrave at Drupalize.Me commented

This resonates with me:

So it's all about knowing where there barriers are and trying to keep them as low as possible to make sure Translation is not the business of 4 or five people at all.

I have zero experience working on a translation, and so I can only rely on what others who are doing that work are saying would be helpful for them. If this is indeed a barrier I'm all for finding a way to lower or remove it.

From a technical perspective I think we can figure out how to accommodate this. There's some work to be done. But we do already know how to do it as we're doing it for the main content already. That's not to say it isn't work. And, if this is only going to be used by one additional language I'm not sure it's worth it.

I do have concerns about the additional burden this puts on the people who are already working on translations to translate, and update, even more content. Updates are probably minimal to the contributor guide. But, it's a lot additional text to take on if you're setting out to translate the user guide.

Joachim Namyslo’s picture

Joachim Namyslo
Primary language German
Location Kulmbach 🇩🇪 🇪🇺
CreditAttribution: Joachim Namyslo as a volunteer and commented

@eojthbrave

You're right. It is a lot of work.

Currently, in the de project there are 4 very active translators, although there are over 1200 Members joined the group.

I don't know where they all gone. I know that most people need translated strings to improve them. And I am glad, to see there are some people still doing things like Metatag and even Webform from scratch. Huge projects with a lot of strings.

Sorry to say that the user guide by now is just a side project.

We tried to engage people translating the User guide for over 2 years now. And nobody liked to help out.

I started over on my own because Drupal 9 is coming.

Currently, I'm trying to find ways to get new people on board. Just because we don't know why people in Germany join the Translation group for German but do not translate much. Most of them correct misspellings or substitute words instead of doing translations from scratch.

Hopefully, that isn't true for other languages.

People are able to learn that much about Drupal just by translating and reviewing the UI. Same is true for the user guide.

Maybe we Just need a German Addison Berry or Joe Shindelar to teach the folks why it makes sense to translate things like the user guide and how to help out. In other words. A German Drupalize.Me would help a lot, to get more people on board. :-)

I wouldn't say Germans are lazy but it is much more fun to watch James Bond with German audio than to watch it in English with subtitles, for most people here.

That example could be adopted to Drupal as well.

Yes, it is workload to producer guides about how to review, translations, Review the user guide, and translate guidelines for using asciidoc. But it is needed to catch more people to share the workload in the future.

If you are not sure that it is worth it just do a query on YouTube fro Drupal 8 Deutsch and Drupal 7 Deutsch. You'll notice that there are many more videos for Drupal 7 out there than for Drupal 8, just because we were not able to teach people about Drupal 8 in Germany like the folks at drupalize.me and the community on d.o did it in the US .

In my opinion, it would be worth it, if there are many more creators out there producing content of all kinds in their native language to reach more people, regardless it is a video or not. The user guide and its Guidelines translated in German is just one thing we can do to take care about that and it may not be the best option to engage more people.

jhodgdon’s picture

jhodgdon
she/her
Primary language English
CreditAttribution: jhodgdon commented

What do you think about this idea:

a) Any language group that wants to make a blog post, a page on their language community web site, a page on localize.drupal.org, a YouTube video, or whatever that explains how/why to help with translations, please do that.

b) We will add links to this information on:
https://www.drupal.org/docs/user_guide_guidelines/practicalities.html#pr...

Thoughts?