Globalizing the Haiku website

1

The Haiku website would have broader international appeal if translations of the news articles and some non-English language forums were provided. Judging by the memberlist, German, Swedish, and Portuguese speakers form the biggest groups. After these, there is a very long list of other languages represented in the memberlist:

Turkish, Japanese, Hindi, Russian, Estonian, Lithuanian, French, Romanian, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Tagalog, Hebrew, Dutch, Finnish, Polish, Croatian, Danish, Norwegian, Moldovan, Slovakian, Ukrainian, Czech, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Korean

Translations could probably only be obtained from Haiku forum members, so the role of the website administrator(s) would be to facilitate the posting and organization of non-English content. If anyone has ideas about how to do this , please post away! (auf Englisch, bitte).

2
exception_thrower wrote:
The Haiku website would have broader international appeal if translations of the news articles and some non-English language forums were provided. Judging by the memberlist, German, Swedish, and Portuguese speakers form the biggest groups. After these, there is a very long list of other languages represented in the memberlist:

Turkish, Japanese, Hindi, Russian, Estonian, Lithuanian, French, Romanian, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Tagalog, Hebrew, Dutch, Finnish, Polish, Croatian, Danish, Norwegian, Moldovan, Slovakian, Ukrainian, Czech, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Korean

Translations could probably only be obtained from Haiku forum members, so the role of the website administrator(s) would be to facilitate the posting and organization of non-English content. If anyone has ideas about how to do this , please post away! (auf Englisch, bitte).

It’s in the TO DO list, but we have to finalize the English site first. :slight_smile:

Cheers,

3

Re-casting the Haiku website in another language will be a big job and involve ongoing maintenance. Also, there will have to be enough members who can read/write that language to form a self-sustaining group. One small step toward addressing these issues is to create a new forum dedicated to a particular language, publicly announce what it’s for, then send a personal message to whomever is thought to use that language with an invitation to participate.

As far a which language to start with, I think the criteria should be

  1. The size of the the member group that seems to speak that language (ex. How many members are from Germany, Brazil, Vatican City, etc.)
  2. The frequency of posts attributed to members of that group. (ex. Out of a group of 12, 5 people post on a regular basis, 3 people infrequently, and 4 only once.)

The advantage of globalizing the Haiku website by small, incremental steps is that either the people who will do the actual work will identify themselves or it will become apparent that there’s not enough interest in that language to make a go of it.

4

i visit this board frequently aswell as i receive the mails from the mailing-list for the purpose of being informed about news concerning the Haiku.
the only thing that holds me back from posting here is the fact that i can’t
articulate myself in proper english, so a german forum (did I mention that
I’m german?) would be recomned for my participation to this community …

so a ++ for the forum-thingy, but please don’t decide by any number of
inactive users (i can’t imagine to be the only person with these problems in foreign languages)

5
Weishaupt wrote:
the only thing that holds me back from posting here is the fact that i can't articulate myself in proper english

Sounds like a great way to learn the ins and outs of English! :smiley: I think the majority of posters/readers here are understanding of those who don’t speak English fluently or natively. Haiku is, after all, and internationally-distributed community. So feel free to test your abilities and maybe we can help you improve them :slight_smile:

For a very brief period - we had separate areas in the forum for various languages. It didn’t last long at that point. I think the biggest hurdle is the inability to properly moderate and administer the forum like that with as few resources as there are available now.

It might be a great opportunity to set up HUGs (Haiku User Groups) with their own message boards in each country/language - or wait and see what the Haiku admin team has planned (I don’t know - but Koki probably does) :slight_smile:

6

The forum pages (such as this one) are encoded in iso-8859-1 (Latin-1) rather than utf-8 (unicode). I think this implies that the forums run on phpBB 2.0.x. which uses iso-8859-1 as a default, or that the backend database is storing characters in iso-8859-1, or both. Maybe ‘Globalizing the Website’ comes down to ‘Upgrading the Software’ at some point in 2007.

7
exception_thrower wrote:
Maybe 'Globalizing the Website' comes down to 'Upgrading the Software' at some point in 2007.

Maybe when 3.0 is out of beta?

8

A little cutting and pasting to verify there’s no longer a problem.

Japanese:
高病原性鳥インフルエンザの疑いがある鶏が大量死した宮崎県日向市東郷町の養鶏場で、２４日も新たに７５０羽が死に、死んだ鶏は計１３１９羽になった。養鶏場では前日から引き続いて県職員が消毒を実施。現地視察した東国原（ひがしこくばる）英夫（そのまんま東）知事は「一刻を争う緊急事態。風評被害対策にも万全を尽くす」と述べた。

Russian:
Перед процедурой подписания документа состоялась беседа Президента Татарстана Минтимера Шаймиева с руководством ОАО “СИБУР Холдинг”, в которой также приняли участие Премьер-министр РТ Рустам Минниханов, Государственный советник при Президенте РТ по экономическим вопросам Марат Сафиуллин.

Arabic:
القدس المحتلة – سبأ نت : علي تكريم
عاد منبر صلاح الدين الأيوبي الى المسجد الأقصى الليلة الماضية بعد إعادة بنائه في الأردن بعد أن أتت عليه النيران التي أشعلها متطرف صهيوني في المسجد الأقصى في العام 1969.وذلك بعد سبعة وثلاثين عاماً من حرق المسجد وأكل نيران الحريق منبر صلاح الدين الأيوبي بعد الهجوم الصهيوني عليه.

Chinese:
据新华社华盛顿1月23日电 面对支持率跌至最低点和12年来民主党人首次掌控国会的不利局面，美国总统布什在23日晚参众两院联席会议上发表国情咨文，就国内政策提出一系列倡议，试图缓和国会因伊拉克战争而与他产生的严重分歧，缓解目前面临的政治困境

Swedish:
Två män i 70-årsåldern gick i dag genom isen, men de kunde räddas sedan Christer Nilsson snabbt slängt ut en boj till männen. Samtidigt ringde han räddningstjänsten som fick upp de svårt nedkylda männen som klamrade sig fast vid bojen.

German:
Für die letzten zwei Jahre von George W. Bush im Weißen Haus kann man in Washington Abreißkalender kaufen, die täglich die Vorfreude auf das Ende seiner Amtszeit steigern sollen. Als gewissenhafter Spielverderber muss man hier aber zur Vorsicht mahnen: Wie berechtigt die Vorfreude ist, hängt ja auch von der ungewissen Politik nach Bush ab. Und die Unterstellung, dass Bush im Grunde irgendwie jetzt schon vollkommen abgewirtschaftet und politisch machtlos ist, greift den Dingen etwas zu weit voraus.

Portuguese:
O Ministério Público Federal (MPF) em São Paulo entrou, nesta quarta-feira, com ação civil pública pedindo à Justiça Federal que a pista principal do Aeroporto de Congonhas seja interditada e todos os pousos e decolagens sejam suspensos até a conclusão da reforma já anunciada pela Infraero.

Hebrew:
חייו המלאים של צעיר אוסטרלי מוצעים למכירה ב-eBay תמורת 7,500 דולר אוסטרלי. ניקל הולט הציע “חיים חדשים למכירה!” כלומר את שמו, מספר הטלפון שלו וכל לרכושו. לא זאת בלבד, אלא שהצעיר מציע גם את חוג מכריו ואת המאהבות הפוטנציאליות שלו “עמן פלירטטתי”. כך מדווחת סוכנות הידיעות AP (ד’).

9

One other thought on this topic, new users should be asked which languages they speak when registering their accounts. This way, people will know who to ask when a translation is necessary.

This could come in handy when the MARCOM team wants to send press releases to websites or publications in other countries.