Feedback on the process for new translators
I invited Blockly users to sign up with translatewiki and got this feedback from an experienced developer, which I thought would be useful to your usability team:
- Thank you for starting this. Translating and incorporating new translations should be much more scalable now, yay! I was excited to translate the puzzle... but after an hour, I still can't do that yet.
- So I think some heads-up to translators who are unacquainted with translatewiki will probably be very helpful. Can you please provide more instruction on how to get started? As a completely new user, here are the issues I ran into. (Warning: I'll be going into details :)
- - When I first went to "https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translating:Blockly", I had no clue that the first link "Translate this project" at the very top was it. I finished reading the page, looked over the puzzle app for some link to download a file... you know, like the old way. I even poked at the en.json file and almost got going with it... :)
- - Next, I didn't know I had to request permission to start translating. I did realize I needed to create an account and did that. Then, after I went back to Blockly project and clicked "Translate this project", and selected Vietnamese, and started to edit the messages/phrases... there was no "Save" button anywhere. Only then did I find the note about permission, and went to request it.
- - Requesting permission takes a while (it's not a matter of minutes, as I'm still waiting for my approval after almost an hour). In order to request permission, we have to go through the "Getting started wizard", which confused me a bit, too, especially around "Configure your preferences" and which language was which. I was like "I just wanted to start translating Blockly!"
- These are just issues about getting acquainted to wikitranslate. I'm not sure if we have any capacity to help improve wikitranslate itself, so it's just helpful to give some heads-up to enthusiastic Blockly translators.
Thank you. I think this is being worked on, in the meanwhile the easiest thing to do is usually to send people to the main page or Special:FirstSteps directly; after they do that, finding the translation interface is easy, while the contrary is less.