Internationalization is at the same time needed and hard to achieve.
I may be a little late in this redesign discussion, but I think it's important to bring some light to this issue.
We - computer people - don't think about that too much. It's accepted that one can't be a good programmer without reading proficiency in English. So, why worry? If a open source community is delivering a product for programmers, just let make a website in English. If there are some people that can't understand English, let the national communities deal with that. Well Rails uses this very approach.
But... it doesn't work with Drupal. Drupal is not meant to be a software for developers, it's intended to be usable by everyone. Drupal wants to democratize access to web publishing. We need to democratize access to drupal.org, for normal people from everywhere. Wordpress - who despite the ugly code does understant a bit about users - get it.
And no, rely on national communities is not enough. It's hard to keep a national community, it's hard to keep it nice and up-to-date, it may be hard for people to find it, it may be . We need at least a landing page, something official, something that tells them "look, you can use it, too".
What to translate, then? It's not practical to translate everything and not everything need to be translated. My suggestion is the following.
Translate:
- Frontpage: a home page for non-English speakers is needed. It can be simplified, some content such as success cases can be removed. But a landing page is essencial.
- About: this is easy to translate and very important
- Documentation: hard to translate, very very needed
- Other static pages: get started, get involved
On the other hand, don't translate truly dynamic content: Jobs, Events, Shop Issues
I'm not realy sure about news and project pages. I'm not sure people will be able to translate news quickly.
On the other hand, perhaps some projects could have at least a short generic description in other language, but it may become too messy.
Any other issues concerning it's implementation?
José San Martin
Chuva Inc.