[tor-bugs] #6851 [Website]: Resume allowing website translations

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#6851: Resume allowing website translations
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 Reporter:  arma     |          Owner:  phobos
     Type:  project  |         Status:  new   
 Priority:  normal   |      Milestone:        
Component:  Website  |        Version:        
 Keywords:           |         Parent:        
   Points:           |   Actualpoints:        
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Comment(by phobos):

 I've been waiting for this topic to resurface. Here's the history of
 website translations:

 1. We originally required all translators to keep their translations up to
 date using WML and SVN. Only the German and Ukrainian translations were
 anywhere near current. We have about 10 other languages which were old,
 out of date, and in some cases very poorly translated. SVN and WML were
 stumbling blocks to most translators.
 2. Based on a contract with BBG, we enabled pootle to make translations
 web-based. We gained a simplified chinese translation that was kept fairly
 current until the police harassed him and he stopped. We paid for some
 people to do translations, but more and more of our website translations
 were out of date. Pootle struggled with the WML and HTML inside our pages.
 3. We changed the WML publishing script to remove translations for pages
 with less than 80% current. This removed a lot of pages and confused a lot
 of users. The users would browse one page in their native language and
 then get forced into an English page for no apparent reason.
 4. As we lost more and more active translators, we switched to transifex
 because they have a large community of people already. Transifex also
 struggled with the non-content in our pages (WML and HTML).
 5. We changed the design of the website and no one was excited about
 keeping translations up to date via SVN, Pootle/Transifex or anything. As
 our translated pages were very out of date and about to be ridiculously
 out of date, we purged them and just published the English pages. TSUM was
 born out of a need for simple documentation and translations.

 The fundamental problem with translations is that our content and code are
 mixed into one file. If we can separate out our content from our code on
 the website, we can discuss enabling website translations again. At this
 point, it would be easier and simpler to use bing or google web page
 translator than to actually hand-craft translations.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6851#comment:4>
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