localisation of reps portal on pontoon.mozilla.org

[ranjithrajv]

Goal:

Allow reps portal to be localised and create a framework to accommodate local leaders who are good with local language to grow.

Problem:

The current English only framework structurally alienates the local leaders who are good at local language but not English and thus curbing the growth of local communities.

Solution

Talking about diversity would make more sense by providing structurally better frameworks for local leaders to grow.

[MichaelKohler]

I think a Discourse topic would be better fitted for such a discussion. We can still create a github issue to track specifics after we know what exactly is needed/should be implemented/should be changed.

I think only localizing the portal itself doesn't help a lot. Happy to provide more of my thoughts in a more general discussion. Do you want to start that thread?

[Mte90]

I agree also because there will be problems.
Think about it, I from Italy create a new event with an english section but the the website is localize in Italian so it will be not possible to localize it (without a specific implementation).
At the same time someone from Asia add an event and write in their language but I cannot translate that in Italian.
So in few words in that way we will have a portal with mixed text between all the locales. Also the Reps portal is used between Reps and Mozilla so is important that the content is in English and the diversity about the text will be complicated to maintain in a long term.

[mastizada]

That is easy to do. There is currently Work In Progress (WIP) to update to Django 1.11, after that one, we can easily make app localizable and connect to Pontoon translation tool. After approval, we can open bugzilla bug for this and I'll be happy to work on this.

[Mte90]

I know that is easy from a dev point of view, the problem is what we can translate of the UI?
Only the UI of the website and all the reps will upload their content in multiple locales?

[mastizada]

UI of the website is the easy part (static content). If we will decide to add events in multiple languages (dynamic content) (adding translations for events from the UI while adding new event), that will be hard both for reps and for devs.

[Mte90]

So we need to evaluate if it is the case to translate or not all the content and not only the website per se.

[ranjithrajv]

D&I team did a great research to address struggles of non-native English speakers in an English-first organization.

https://medium.com/mozilla-open-innovation/we-see-you-reaching-diverse-audiences-in-foss-4e83efc86425

[Mte90]

In this ticket all the people that are discussing are not native english speaker so we know what is the issue.
The point is:

• Translate the portal and not all the events
• Translate the portal and also the events

If the first point, we will have a not uniform UX with the invite to the reps to write their event data in their language (if the website is on my language I can write on my language is usually what we think) so another Rep, as example, cannot understand what is the content (maybe also for the budget/swag request).
If the second point, we will have a lot of events to translate in different language and the rule will be probably: language of the rep owner and english. So we will have again not uniform UX with everything in the locale of the rep but the reps content will be in english like right now. We cannot ask to the l10n community to translate the event data of every event in the portal (in the language of all the Reps). Because why I have to translate an event of somewhere in the world that not involve me? Also we will have the issue to centralize the database of content to access to pontoon or other system that the l10n have to translate for something that has a very low priority.

Also we have to consider that this portal is only for Reps and one of the criteria for onboarding is english knowledge. Usually mozillians (that are not reps) not use that portal that used to track what Reps are doing.

The Reps portal is different from addons.mozilla.org as example where the portal is localized, the develop can add the page text in every language supported (because the extension maybe is localized itself) and this portal is used by millions of Firefox users not by 320~ Reps.

[Mte90]

I think that we can close this ticket and see when there will be other feedback to continue with the discussion.