Crowdsourced localization

I wonder if there is some way to prompt our users to suggest alternative wordings in their native language in order to improve the language support of Rocket.chat?

Seems like this could potentially be a summer of code project.

LingoHub that we use currently is somewhat like that - although the participants are controlled - added manually.

Adding it to RC itself is an interesting thought, any idea on how to do proper curation?

May need a reputation system ? Designated curators? Voting?

Would be interesting to see how to scope it to the 2.x month terms of a GSoC student.

Neat idea. It may also be interesting to see whether existing open source tooling could be used or combined with Rocket.Chat. The latter obviously requires more effort.

I haven’t had a deeper look into the world of community-sourced FOS web-based translation software but I think it might be worth to look around. From a quick search only I came across this:

http://pootle.translatehouse.org/index.html

But I think there are at least two others worth looking at :slight_smile:

Cheers
Thomas

Thank you both for responding. I was unaware of both of those links. I wonder if something like LingoHub/Pootle could be implemented as a bot inside Rocket.chat.

Workflow might be something like:

When in Preferences/Localization, we could provide a “your language not listed here” option and users could select that if they would prefer a language or dialect that we do not yet support. Or if they wanted to help enhance our existing translations. This would add the #from_to_language channel (Ex: #from_english_to_hawaiian) to their channels.

When in that channel, the user could type /view_translations to view the current best translation of each snippet of Rocket.chat localization text.

Or to view the translation of a single phrase:

/translate

Ex:

/translate “Direct Messages”

The bot would then return

“Kuhi Manaʻo”
Suggest alternative? (y/n)

The user could then type

y

And the bot could provide a list of alternatives that the user could pick from or offer a new suggestion. After voting and/or suggesting, the bot would return the existing vote tallies on the top alternatives.

Once we’ve reached a certain number of votes on each snippet of text that requires translation we could allow users to select a “custom” localization and enable those translations.

If enough users select a given “custom” localization then the rocket.chat team can decide to add that to the default list.

Anyway, just one approach. Other ideas?

Thanks,

Peter