Currently the Magazine allows for articles in English (point 8):
Allowing for articles in other languages may increase and broaden Fedora user engagement. Wordpress has plugins that will allow multilingual sites. Translators might be willing to help with workflow suggestions. is there any support or interest in this?
Yeah sure! The idea is great
We should probably have a Magazine FAQ about issues like this. Most modern periodicals are published in one language, whether it’s Variety or Die Zeit. The Magazine is a simple periodical, and should not be confused with documentation, which is very important to be translated. More languages means an exponential number of editors in those languages are required. It would also be frustrating to readers to find that numerous articles are inaccessible, while (for better or worse) English is a lingua franca in tech. I firmly believe there are more effective ways for the project to attract global contributors that don’t have all these downsides.
Hello @fed500 , welcome to the community and to the Fedora Magazine discussion area. I would have to agree with @pfrields on this suggestion and the requirement for a FAQ which covers this and other repeat questions about what gets published, and what doesn’t. The logistics of the publishing process would become unmanageable for our small editorial board to handle, not to mention most of us aren’t multi-lingual and wouldn’t be able to effectively use our editing skills.
One alternative approach would be for community-hosted sites to translate the articles as they are published. The content license for Fedora Magazine permits this and it would allow translations to appear as they are available instead of having to grow and maintain a many-lingual editorial team.
Wasn’t there a Czech site doing this, for a while at least?
Yes, there was, and I think it’s at least somewhat sensible for separate sites to do that, as it’s fully expected with our licensing.
Using Wordpress multilingual feature would be suboptimal for our community and would never allow small or single-contributor teams to do the job.
My proposal would be to first allow localized articles on a specific website, with a lot of automation so that translators are autonomous.
I am sure this will work with Hugo + Asciidoctor + Po4a + Weblate.
One single manual step: convert Fedora Magazine articles into asciidoc.
About timing, I think I’ll propose it as a change for F35 (I’m fully working of the F34 change regarding fedora localization statistics for now).
If this works as expected, then we could discuss about rationalizing both tools. But I don’t want to force Magazine writers, there is no rush for this.
What do you think?
I like your idea. I think we can automate the whole thing, though. If a bot reads the Magazine RSS feed and runs the html through pandoc, it should be able to produce the asciidoc input programmatically. So then the articles would automatically be available for translation within minutes of publication.
The down side, of course, is that translators wouldn’t be able to work on the translations pre-publication, but there’s generally not a long window between an article being finished and it being published, so I don’t know if that would be much of a difference in practice.
Great. Would the magazine consider moving to Hugo or similar static site
generator at some point?
Wordpress specific features include:
a) What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editor - this seems important,
but may need to create something for Asciidoc
b) search engine optimization - this does not seem so effective
c) grammar checking plugins for English - may need to setup
infrastructure for this, for example