On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 4:20 PM, Kay Schenk <kay.sch...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 7:14 AM, Rob Weir <robw...@apache.org> wrote: > >> On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 9:57 AM, Donald Whytock <dwhyt...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > You don't have to use Google Translate for the entire site into a >> > given language. Better than no page at all in a given language is a >> >> True. To enable this integration requires adding markup to two >> places in the HTML file: >> >> 1) Load some script in the <head> section >> >> 2) Add a Google-provided <div> to wherever in the page we want the >> language selector drop down to be. >> >> It would be really easy to add this to a small number of selected pages. >> >> It would also be easy to add to all pages via the CMS template. >> >> What would be hard is managing this for a large number of pages, but >> not all pages. >> >> > page in a given language that says, "Hi there! This is the site for >> > Apache OpenOffice. We welcome translations of our site into your >> > language, and invite you to volunteer at the following email address: >> > <blah> Or you can submit a translation through Google Translate, which >> > was used to produce this page." >> > >> > Something as short as that is less likely to be garbled in >> > auto-translation than something technical, and it tells potential >> > contributors what to do to help out. >> > >> >> The trick would be to get people to visit that page. Unless it was on >> the home page. >> >> -Rob >> >> > Don >> > > OK, it took me a little while to weed through Google's info on this. > > A good sample can be found at: > > http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/translate-your-website-with-google.html > > Is there any possibility we could ad the gadget to the OOo blogs site -- > > https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/ > > just for fun and see what we think? > This way we'd just be impacting one page and not a whole site. >
If we want access to review and approve suggestions made by readers then it needs to be on a domain that we "own". This is in common with most Google services, you need to demonstrate that you control the domain, typically by adding a special META tag to the homepage. For *.openoffice.org this is easy, and I've already done this to enable Google Analytics. If we want to do the same for the blog we'd need the ability to insert special markup into the <head> and <body> of the blog template. I'm not sure whether this is possible with our Roller setup. Another way of testing this, in a quantitative way, is via what is called "A/B Testing". With this approach we define an action a satisfied site visitor might take, like downloading AOO 3.4. Then we randomly show users either the original home page (or download page or any other page we're testing). This is "A", and then we show other users a different version, B. For example, B could have the translation enabled. Then we ran this "experiment" for a period of time, like a week or two, tracking which version of the page has the higher success rate with users. If the machine translated page leads visitors confuses users, or makes them suspect the page, then the download %'s will be lower than the original page. And if the translated page is helpful then the download numbers would be higher. You could imagine other success indicators. Pretty much anything that has a URL can be measured. For example, imagine we add a link, "This page solved my problem" to the bottom of every documentation page. Even though the link would just go to a "thanks" page, we could use that action to measure the success of translated versus untranslated pages. Of course, we don't need to do this all at once. But I'd recommend we think of ways of quantifying success. The website serves our users. How do we know what is working well and what isn't? How can we design experiments to test alternative approaches? Possible successes for users might be: - downloaded AOO - found answer to their question - signed up for our announcement list - entered their first bug report - signed up for one of the project lists - make first wiki contribution - followed/liked/+1'ed us on one of our social networking sites Measure, improve, repeat. Constant improvement and optimization. We can debate what will improve the website for the users. Or we can test and measure. A/B testing is a new option for us, a technique that once was used only by the largest commercial websites, but is now available to everyone via Google's "content experiments" support in Google Analytics. -Rob > I think that might a perfect application for something like this. > > > > -- > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > MzK > > "I would rather have a donkey that takes me there > than a horse that will not fare." > -- Portuguese proverb
