Can we add a paragraph to the Bug Tracker Etiquette, stating that Trac tickets need to be filed in English (or at least an English translation of the accompanying text in the original language)?
By only posting in non-English, many people are forced to use an online translation service, possibly several times when wanting to read the ticket on multiple occasions. By providing the English translation, only the reporter has to go to the trouble of using a translation service, once.
Having the title in English would also ease searches.
With the caveat of “uses translations” I don’t think this rule makes any sense.
Id the OP can post in english they probably would, and if they cannot then a translation service, no matter which direction, would increase friction a whole lot.
I can for example help with german tickets, but in my experience this requires severall back and forths in german before I can even understand what they want to be able to express it in english. So with a translation in between this is somewhat infeasible.
If we decide non-english speaking people can’t open tickets on trac we may need to figure out where else they can adress their bug reports or concerns.
Perhaps a line saying that, for convenience, posting in English is preferable if possible?
I would have imagined translation services would work well enough for a trac ticket by now. Oh well, as long as there aren’t hundreds of them, I guess I can continue with what probably most do: ignore them. I don’t waste my time putting tickets and all their comments into a translator again and again.
I added this to Making sure you're not a bot! which seemed a better place than the general “etiquette” thing. I worded it telling people to find some help from someone else if they don’t speak English.
So what is your solution?
Because if you don’t come up with one people will do what Humdinger very sensibly does, and ignore non-English tickets.
I wonder whether there is an especially good (or not so bad) translator that could be recommended to non-English speakers.
As I wrote. Ask a human for help. That’s what the international section of the forum and the language specific IRC channels are for.
First problem with translation tools is that they are often better when translating from English than to English. Also they don’t exist for all languages. Therefore an user can be forced to translate in two steps and use a language that they don’t master fully as intermediary. Since translation tools are supposing that grammar and spelling of the original text are correct, it is source of errors.
Also tools quality vary with languages. One can be good for a language and sucks for another.
That makes it difficult to recommend a specific tool.
The big advantage that will have a human being is the knowledge of the context and won’t introduce reference to Kyle Reese because you’re posting a bug about replicants.
I had addressed my question to Nephele, but thank you for your contribution. It’s probably the most practical approach.
I don’t have any “better” solution either, I just ment that using translation services in order to post in english would probably not achieve what we want, and beeing an international team, in some cases some multilingual tickets can be worked on and solved. But that is an edge case since you need the right language and the right developer for the ticket both in one go 