Summary

This document discusses a proposal for a web portal to Ubuntu Translations. The idea of the portal is to have a site on http://translations.ubuntu.com that can serve to aggregate and showcase the current content related to Ubuntu Translations with the main purposes of:

• Inspiring and getting new contributors excited about translations
• Be used as a spring board for anyone to easily get started to translating Ubuntu

Rationale

Currently the information about news, documentation and everything related to keeping up to date or getting involved in Ubuntu translations is spread around several resources: wiki, mailing list, microblogging, Launchpad. The main entry point is the Translations namespace on the Ubuntu wiki at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Translations, which can be a daunting site for newcomers, as well as not providing the option to offer attractive and dynamic content.

Translations is a key area in the Ubuntu community, and we would like to present and make all the essential content available from a single place that is easy to access and provides all the information in a quick way.

User stories

• Sira has been a long time Ubuntu user in his language, Thai. He realises that some parts of Ubuntu are untranslated and would like to contribute translating this. The translations portal points gives him all the essential information so that he can start translating Ubuntu in few minutes.
• Klaudia is new to Ubuntu and would like to get involved in the community. She is good at languages, and lands on the translations portal, which helps her getting excited about translations and find an area to start contributing to.
• Charles works for an OEM. He'd like to ship an Ubuntu image in a set of languages and would like to know how well translated it is for each one of them. The portal provides him articles about translation statistics and a good idea of the languages he can ship and of the ones that might need work.

Requirements

• The portal should provide internationalization support: translators should be able to provide content and it should be translatable in many languages
• Development work should be kept to a minimum: reusability of stable and well-proven solutions will be key

Design and Implementation

Phase 1: Planning and aggregation of current content

• Investigation on reusing infrastructure and best practices from the existing Cloud portal
• Internationalization possibilities of existing software
• Investigation and decision on which content can be added to the portal and how.
  • News and announcements
  • Articles on translations
  • Translations quick start guide
  • Links to reference documentation on the wiki
  • Microblogging
  • Presentation video
  • Videos on how to get started with translations
• Mockups for the site structure and presentation of content
• Deployment of a prototype

Phase 2: Adding new content

• Aggregation of Launchpad content using the Launchpad API
• Community discussion on what content would be useful for translators. Some ideas:
  • Hosting and being able to download translation guides in all supported languages
  • Glossaries for all languages

CategoryTranslations