[tor-talk] No more website translations

["Runa A. Sandvik" <runa.sandvik@xxxxxxxxx>]

From https://blog.torproject.org/blog/whither-website-translations:

As of svn commit 25130 we no longer have our web pages translated. We
continue to translate tor, vidalia, aurora/firefox, our manual pages,
and other documentation included with the various bundles. We're also
going to create a new, simplified user manual that can be translated
and included in our various packages.

I thank our translators, both past and current, and continue to be
impressed at the community we've built up around translating all
things Tor. We appreciate it, our users appreciate, and I appreciate
it.

Why did we do this?

- We spend a lot of time managing the translated pages on the website.
- The English pages are frequently updated, thereby invalidating all
of the other languages.
- The switch to Transifex hasn't made more translators appear,
especially for the languages we may care about the most.
- The translators for many languages that have a right-to-left
orientation complain that the transifex interface is a nightmare to
use and refuse to update.
- Lots of users simply use google translate, or read English anyway.
- Getting translated software into the hands of people is more
important than them reading our web pages (especially if the
documentation is translated and available locally)
- Our translations for right to left languages, such as Arabic and
Farsi, were growing out of date and required far more technical skill
to do than more translators are capable of handling. This involved
editing the raw perl templating system we used.
- And, according to our webserver logs, our translated website traffic
is less than 2% of total GET requests, nevermind page views.

We may go back to the old model, which was svn or git commits directly
to the repository for translations. It seemed this model attracted a
few dedicated translators for some interesting languages. These
languages were always kept current with the English pages. Another
option is automated translation, such as something Bayesian that
understands the difference between the snack cookie and a web browser
cookie.

If you have suggestions or other ideas how to improve our
translations, feel free to respond to ticket #4082.

I still look forward to universal translators, helping me to
understand the polyglot Internet. There is so much content out there
that isn't in languages I understand. I hope universal translators can
greatly improve in a short time.

-- 
Runa A. Sandvik
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