[FM Discuss] Portals for Russian and Spanish manuals?

[Micz Flor]

hi everybody,

like daniel, i would also not group languages by geography. and i would
also not use flags alongside languages.

acknowledging that the internet is a bit on the english side, especially
when it comes to software documentation, it might be worthwhile to
couple the native word with the english word, such as "deutsch / German"
- at least i find that helpful at times.

a "pre-selection" based on the client OS or browser language is helpful,
but it should be easy to "override" such a selection (i remember years
ago it drove me nuts when i could see PHP docs on php.net only in
german...)

wikipedia.net is a good start - and the links from individual articles
to other languages (if available) is very neat. but requires editorial
work and changes in booki, i am sure.

when you think about the use cases, though, a wikipedia.net start page
might just do the trick. it is unlikely that you switch frequently from
language to language - unless you are an editor. a user would go to
his/her language, check if the documentation is available. if not, most
probably go to "english".

On Mon, 2011-06-06 at 11:33 +0100, Daniel James wrote:
> Hi Edward,
> 
> > There appears to be room for 16 language
> > buttons on the top bar. We know that we will have
> > 
> > English
> > French
> > Spanish
> > Finnish
> > German
> > Italian
> > Greek
> > Russian
> > Chinese Traditional
> > Chinese Simplified
> > Arabic
> > Farsi
> > Cambodian
> > Haitian Creole
> > 
> > and others within a few months of releasing the new translation
> > software, and somewhere between 50 and 100, comparable to Sugar and
> > various Linux distributions, within a year. So it is not too soon to
> > start thinking about the next language UI.
> 
> I see your point, the design doesn't scale. Putting the language buttons
> down the side might help in the short term. This is easily done by
> changing the CSS. Beyond that, we might need a tag cloud like the front
> page of http://www.wikipedia.org/
> 
> > or be on a pull-down menu
> 
> The problem with that is if your language is hidden on a pull-down menu,
> you might not find it. It needs to be up-front and obvious. Also,
> pull-down menus aren't good with more than 10 or 20 entries, they don't
> scale well either.
> 
> > perhaps with
> > regional submenus.
> 
> Mixing language with geography is also problematic because of colonial
> languages like English, French and Portuguese. For example if I speak
> French but I am in Africa, I might not expect to find my manual under
> European -> French.
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> Daniel
> _______________________________________________
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> Discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
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Micz Flor 
Head of Communication, Sourcefabric
micz.flor at sourcefabric.org

Sourcefabric 
Prinzessinnenstraße 20 
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DE +49 (0)30 44044999

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