5
Bibbit
3y

So my team started creating an in-house wiki for all information about our products, methods, scrum, documentation etc. From the beginning we had settled on doing everything in English instead of native language just in case we get a foreign student intern or simply a foreign employee... And now it looks to me that nobody but my team leader and I care about it: half of the documents are either fully native (especially from other part of the team who work on a different project, they have probably never gotten the memo of language choice to start with) or the documents are in some weird-ass combination of English-native which is even worse imo.
I really don't understand why my own team doesn't adhere to the decision though: we're all at least reasonably educated and our country focuses heavily on using English as second language so that should be no big barrier. And why would you want inconsistent documents/code?!
And this is not the first time people don't stick to what is decided for things like formats and language... Getting a bit tired of it tbh...

Comments
  • 1
    What cms solution do you use for wiki?
  • 2
    @zemaitis Confluence. I am still not sure whether I like it or not though. Too many functionality is behind a paywall that I would have assumed to be common in wikis
  • 3
    maybe a solution for your language problem is continuous localization. Where the copy text is stored in git and a ci instance translates either by human translators or machine translation your copy into the specified languages and serves them via i18n on the website.

    https://serge.io
    Continuous Localization | Serge

    And use www.deepl.com as translation service. (Better than google translate, pro version has an api)
  • 2
    @heyheni that documentation will be technical and will have domain specific terms and info.

    Machine translation will suck as always.

    Human translation will be just confusing and not helpful because the translators don't have the domain knowledge and context.

    Just look at the 'translated' docs from Google and MS.

    So I think the only way to go is for the original authors to write the stuff in the target language themselves.
  • 2
    @heyheni that will not really work in our case. As @LensFlare said: it's also too technical and a big part of the documentation is written partially English, partially native. So translating written texts non-stop is simply "mopping with an open watercrane".
    All is fixed if people just write in the agreed-upon format, no need for automation there :)
Add Comment