Website translations [was Re: 4.8.1 has been released]

[Dirk Hohndel]

> On Jul 14, 2018, at 7:08 AM, Murillo Bernardes <mfbernardes at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Jul 14, 2018 at 1:53 AM Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Speaking of which, we should reconsider some of the translations that we offer.
>> 
>> Dutch and Spanish are clearly actively maintained. German is somewhat maintained.
>> The other languages haven't seen updates in a long time...
>> Do we have people interested in maintaining French, Italian, Polish, Russian, Portuguese, and Finnish?
> 
> I have finished the Brazilian Portuguese a few days ago. Still have
> some terms to make consistent all around but nothing huge. I plan to
> keep it up to date.
> 
> Portugal Portuguese is also fully translated (by someone).


I realize that this was rather easy to misunderstand. I changed the subject to make it
clear that this email is about the website...

The translations of Subsurface are in AMAZING shape. And we have more than a dozen
actively maintained translations that are at or near 100%.

The translations of the website, on the other hand, are a very different story. And that's
what I was referring to here.

Translations are hard work, and keeping them maintained is even harder work. But for
our non-English-speaking users, having a web presence (and announcements) in their
native language is a big deal. A few years ago we did a push for this and got the version
back then translated into

- German
- Spanish
- Dutch
- French
- Italian
- Polish
- Russian
- Portuguese
- Finnish

Of those languages, the first three are still somewhat maintained - new announcements
are usually translated. Some others have fallen way behind even on some of the static
pages. Polish doesn't have a translated landing page. Several of the languages don't
have the link to the latest versions. Even fewer have a current translation of the Download
page (which, btw, needs to be updated in English as well, which is another way of saying
"hey, I'm not pointing fingers... keeping the website up to date is hard and I fail most of
the time even for the two languages I sort of speak")

What I was trying to do with the comment in the announcement above was solicit feedback
on some of the languages that seem to have fallen further behind. Is anyone interested
in maintaining these languages? Or should we drop them if outdated content is actually
ending up being counter-productive?

/D