jacklinke
commented
1 week ago Aha! I didn't see that there were previous attempts at this!
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@tobiasmcnulty proposed https://github.com/django/djangoproject.com/issues/883 to add a language switcher.
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Way back in 2015, @bmispelon proposed having the fundraising page translated in https://github.com/django/djangoproject.com/issues/377, and @pauloxnet and @carltongibson seemed to think it a good idea.
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And https://github.com/django/djangoproject.com/pull/1251 was an ambitious effort by @marksweb to get the non-docs portion of the site moved forward for translation. It seems like it was too much to try to incorporate at once, but I really appreciate the work he did and the effort he put in.
(The comment from that issue here really helped frame some of my thoughts, too. The flatpages are their own beast, and can be a future effort if desired.)
Even if we do not translate every piece of the site quickly, here is a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to at least getting the site to be more friendly to django folks who don't speak English or for whom it is not their first language. Djangoproject.com is the world's front door to Django! (or it should be)
To avoid the same fate as #1251, and based on the recommendations in that PR, I propose the following to move this idea forward. Each step would have a separate PR if needed. In this way, no single PR would be especially challenging or time-consuming to review and approve, and because none of them are truly dependent upon the others they can be accomplished in any order without causing degradation.
- [x] Identify which templates already have translation tags and which do not.
- [ ] Working app-by-app, perform the following and submit a PR:
- [ ] Add translation tags to the remainder of templates
- [ ] Implement use of
gettextin user-facing strings throughout the app's files (models, forms, etc)
- [ ] Implement
gettextfor user-facing strings in the site's static files and submit a PR - [ ] Add a view, url, and template to allow visitors to change the displayed language and submit a PR
- [ ] Begin working with the translations team to identify translators for the real work
Further, while working through each of these, I would recommend pulling in the tagging/gettext work @marksweb has already done if the template/file hasn't changed in the meantime.
- Does this breakdown seem like a reasonable way to approach the problem while avoiding the struggle of previous attempts?
- When it comes to organizing the work, would it be beneficial to create a set of issues (one for each of the checklist items above), and track their overall progress under another issue? Something like @thibaudcolas has done in https://github.com/django/djangoproject.com/issues/1496?
marksweb
Proposal to add translation support for non-docs pages
While Django’s documentation is translated into several languages, the main entry-point to the framework — the djangoproject.com website itself — remains mostly untranslated. Ensuring djangoproject.com is accessible to non-English speakers is important for demonstrating Django’s inclusivity and supporting a broad user base.
Internals - Internationalizationforum, please let me know, but the technical portion of this proposal (adding translation templatetags) at least seemed more appropriate to post here.This issue did not seem to be identified as a problem in the recent User research report (1496)
Discussion
It feels a bid odd to see that the docs are translated into a variety of languages, but the greater djangoproject.com site is only available to English speakers.
Django strongly promotes internationalization, with clear documentation on using trans and blocktrans tags, and even shows an example of using
{% blocktrans %}and{% trans %}templatetags on the Start page, but the page itself is only available in English. (ref)One issue that we will run into is the content of djangoproject.com is a mix of text in templates and text that comes from models. While the models-based text could be a problem for another day, there are concrete steps we could take today to work toward translation of the template-based text.
Questions
Proposed Work
See updated checklist in the comment below
Templates with at least some
transorblocktranstagsApproximate percentage of tags present on each template in the repo compared to potential
transorblocktransopportunities.Templates with no
transorblocktranstagsNote: Only those templates with text that can be translated but have no
transorblocktranstags are included in the list below. All remaining templates whcih only load other templates or only load text content from models have been excluded.