Localisation

That rules!

It wouldn't be too hard to get the ball rolling on this. It just requires a very small amount of Rails knowledge.

Maybe we should invite Petros into the conversation here? I'm just wondering if Petros has previous experience with translating a Rails application (not necessary, but would be helpful).

The only tricky part I can see is making a decision or two about how we want to implement it from a url perspective (e.g. en.loomio.org or loomio.org/en). Or maybe we don't even use urls to start out with and just store the preference on a per-user basis. Or we could do what Google does and buy every single country domain name (loomio.co.uk, loomio.de, loomio.fr, etc.), and have the language preferences set automatically based on what country domain name you're visiting.

We love buying domains!

This is awesome. Fully in favor. However, as someone who has worked on a lot of software localization in my past professional life, be aware that it can be a lot of work and is harder than it might seem. If we can set it up so volunteers can easily do it, awesome. But if we're managing it I think we have other immediate priorities right now.

Hi,
Thank you for invitation.
This is what I have in mind at the moment:
1. I am not an experienced Ruby translator. We (the FreeLab collective) are just the wanna-be users of loomio. However, I am seasoned user and I have been translating app interfaces before.
2. I am a co-founder of the Warsaw HackerSpace, so I hope I will be able to get some professional support here.
3. We shall be definitively doing the group translation, volunteer-based. It seems the only reasonable approach as you will have more and more requests, I guess.

Welcome Petros! Glad to have you here :)

A question for everyone: if we start offering Loomio in various languages, how will we deal with support requests? Seems to me a prerequisite to supporting a localization project would be a solid volunteer community manager who is willing to also provide basic support in that language, and translate requests back to us. In this case Petros would be great, but we should put good processes in place to encourage this for any future languages too.

I concur, so much of localisation is the support for the market rather than "just" the meaningful localisation of text & resources. I've worked in Localisation for a fair chunk of professional career, 6 years, so I'd be happy to join a session with you guys to work out some of the gotchas before you open a can of worms.

Alanna is on the right track, designating local community managers is a great first step.

Count me in. FreeLab will be more than happy to support Loomio in Poland. If we stick with the dual model (SAAS + open source) it fits our social activity ideally.
Please let me know what homework should I do to be prepared for managing group localisation?

That's great Petros! I think the best thing you can do right now is look into how other projects have handled localisation and create a plan, then present it to us and we'll figure out how to help put it in motion.

Also might be useful to google and read up about about how to do internationalization in Rails.

If you need some help getting Rails up and running on your machine, feel free to start a discussion in the Code subgroup and just ask whatever questions you have and we can help you out. We've got a Vagrant box which can make installing Rails a bit easier if you're interested (https://s3.amazonaws.com/loomio-misc/public/loomio_vagrant.zip). It's a virtual machine that you run that already has Rails and everything you need installed on it.

Anyway, welcome to the community Petros! It's really great to have you here. Looking forward to your contributions! =)

Hi every one , I just landed on the loomio planet today, and I'm 15years web developper experience but unfortunetly total newbie in Rails, so this will be a fun way to start. Our objectives with Loomio, is to get it running in french as well , so I'll be takling internationalisation as well Petros. My mum is Polish and I speak it very basically ;-). Anyway by experience : there are 2 standard ways of dealing with i18n , file driven translation or DB driven , both offcourse will be cached. I work on Yii (Php) as an example there is a global translation class so any translatable element is replace with yii::translate('category','word | sentence ') and the type of translation engine is simply pluggued as a config.
anyway please bare with me as I install my first Rails context and start with this http://guides.rubyonrails.org/i18n.html

Hi Tibor! Really excited to have you working on this.

I believe Rails translation is pretty similar to what you described with Yii. Exciting that this will be your first Rails project. Hope you enjoy it! =)

Let me know if you have any questions. Rails can be difficult to install sometimes. If you find this to be the case, then you can try using the Vagrant VM clone that I mentioned in the previous message.