Hi Roman, Well, I guess stuff like the content from Apache-legal wouldn’t be what I would feel comfortable with having auto-translated. But for most other stuff, I could imagine that storing the original and then maybe using the openAI API to have it translated to English and then storing that alongside on the incoming part, would be one option. Then I could imagine that there must be some sort of JS plugin, we could integrate into our websites that checks if there’s an original in that language or to use the same API to dynamically have it translated.
But I understand that currently this is sort of a theoretic question. I would doubt MS/OpenAI would appreciate us asking up to 2 questions for everything that happens at the ASF: * Is this content English? * Please translate this content to English Also could I imagine that this service would not be available to everyone and in all countries, so probably for the ad-hoc translations a pluggable mechanism probably would be required. But I think it would be worth digging deeper, if there’s a general consent here, that something like that would make sense. Chris Von: Roman Shaposhnik <ro...@shaposhnik.org> Datum: Donnerstag, 26. Oktober 2023 um 13:05 An: dev@community.apache.org <dev@community.apache.org> Betreff: Re: Helping to welcome non-english communities by questioning our rules? On Thu, Oct 26, 2023 at 10:42 AM Christofer Dutz <christofer.d...@c-ware.de> wrote: > > Hi all, > > as some of you might know, I recently joined a company where most employees > are native Chinese speakers. > I was looking forward to this for the reason of gaining more insight into how > these communities work and was hoping to gain some actionable things to help > make the ASF more welcoming to these communities. > > Yes: Many of us say: English is the most spoken and understood language on > the planet. > However even if someone might understand English and might be able to write > English, they still might not feel comfortable doing so. > In the PLC4X project we have one person who stated that on multiple occasions > and he’s a valuable part of the community. > > It seems that our way of writing English emails, even if accessible to > communities in China, still it causes them to build up parallel structures: > > * WeChat Groups > * Workspaces using tools like Lark/Feishu > > I was always trying to convince them to come and have discussions on > mailing-lists but have generally failed to do so. > > Now after starting to work at Timecho, I got used to using their chat tool > (Feishu) … it’s sort of like Teams combined with Office 365. > But the feature that struck me most, was the ability that I could select any > channel and enable the “Translation assistant”. Here I could select which > language I want to read the discussions in, and I can even have the assistant > auto-translate everything to Chinese. This way I can communicate with my > colleagues as if I was communicating with native English speakers. It’s been > nothing but amazing to see how easy it is to simply ignore language barriers > and focus on the task at hand and not having to deal with writing in a > non-native language (Well … I think I would be 100% lost, if someone asked me > to write in Chinese ;-) ) > > This got me thinking: > We have this rule: If it didn’t happen on the list, it didn’t happen (Don’t > even know if it’s really written down somewhere or if it’s just a common > mantra). > But I think this is just one instance of a solution to the problem of us > wanting to have every decision documented and archived and searchable, so > everyone can participate and later search for reasons why a project did what > they did. > So … what if we question this rule. > I was thinking of if we couldn’t achieve what the rule wanted, by introducing > a new solution into the picture. > What if we had a global storage for everything that happens in a project? > Every input to the project is stored in this system. This input could be in > any language. > If we had a sponsor to allow auto-translating things to English (I am sure > there are services out there able to do that) > A translated English version could be stored alongside the original. > Now every system we use, could have plugins to send to this central system: > Email, GitHub, Jira, Slack, WeChat, … > If someone could now use this system to follow everything that a project is > doing, possibly using the translation API to have things converted into the > language he can understand. > > I think (except for the translation service), we should have everything we > need inside the foundation. > > What do you folks think? Yes, and... ;-) ...I've been thinking along the same lines given that I have recently helped OpenAtom Foundation get to a point where they have native translations/explanations of portions from https://www.apache.org/legal/ The translations are done and have been reviewed by two of our long standing, bi-lingual ASF members. So they are as good as it gets. Now, the question I have is: how can we promote this to our communities who may benefit from it? The reason I'm asking is not to hijack this thread ;-) but rather to figure out what would be our attitude towards non-english content (like what you're suggesting Chris). Would we be comfortable putting it some place on apache.org ? Would a better option be simply linking to some other resource? Would a parallel, web property managed by folks affiliated with ASF, but not officially ASF be a better option? But to get back to Chris' question: my answer would be "YES -- let's collect all things that can be helpful (regardless of the language)", but my followup question would be: how should we manage/expose/promote it? Thanks, Roman. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org
