(Normally I tend not to write any personal posts here, but hey, why not?)
It is the end of the year and time for new year’s resolutions. Luckily I had a great year and did most of the things I planned to do (the classics like losing weight, cleaning up the flat, changing my work and so on) worked out swimmingly. I gave a lot of talks, trained a lot of people, re-invented my job and organized my own event. All in all I am very happy about all that.

So then, for the coming year I’ve just written an article for Digital Web that will be released in the new year that covers a lot of my thoughts on what I want to do. Generally I am seeing harsh times ahead – people are spooked out by the financial recession and the short time fixes (yes, layoffs). This means to me that I am planning to do a few things differently to give myself space to work with colleagues and contacts to get through this.

My laundry list for the year:

• be more moderate – I can get very cross about things that in the big picture are not of that much importance (this has improved constantly over the last few years though)
• concentrate my work on markets and environments I hadn’t covered much this year – specifically universities as environments and South East Asia as markets (I am already scheduled for 3 university hack days in the US and India and plan to find more Hong Kong/China/Signapore/Australia/Taiwan/Korea assignments)
• finish my work for the Opera Web Standard Curriculum (sorry Chris, I have delayed a lot)
• write (or at least start) another book – this time for O’Reilly
• look closer at my finances (I am terrible at that)
• turn my flat into more of a home than a place to change suitcases
• take Scripting Enabled more on the road. Somehow the “go forth and do it” doesn’t work that well…
• clean out icant.co.uk ;)

Let’s see how I will succeed.

I am currently in the German countryside to see my family and old school friends. My brother’s internet connection is actually trained weasels carrying the things I type on 5.1/4” floppy disk to the next internet hub and I need to write everything in their beautiful but hard language.

Therefore I am not answering emails, will only twitter from Blackberry and generally try out this offline “life” thing for a few days.

Merry Christmas ya’ll!

cheers
Chris

Things that made me happy this morning (evening, afternoon? what do I know, jetlagged and confused):

• The Videos of Paris Web talks are now available – most of them in French, but two in English. In any case awesome content, check them out! Amazing “bang for your buck” conference, that one.
• Opera’s “Mother” Henny Swan talks about the state of the accessible web 2008
• One of the cooler thinks Henny talks about is Project:Possibility, an Open Source initiative to build accessible software. Check out the awesome favicon on that one! 5.1/4” floppy with wheelchair FTW!
• While “us Brits” (well, I can play now, can’t I?) had a good insight into who represents us in parliament via they work for you for quite a while now, the New York Times hackers brought the same convenience to the unwashed masses via Represent. I love the clear look of it!
• I’ve been to my first Mozilla Labs Meetup and it was great – especially after the Manhattan mixed by Brendan Eich…
• To round things up, I am very happy that someone set a record for Most Images Of Fish Sandwiches Looked At In One Minute so I don’t have to.

Paris Web – one of my favourite conferences last year – just released all the videos of the presentations. Most of the presentations are in French, but mine is in English:

• Download and watch the presentation on SlideShare

In the talk I advocated re-using components and systems we already have to work faster, deliver better and have less hardware and software overhead in doing so.

These are:

• Design Patterns, Design Pattern Stencils
• CSS frameworks: YUI grids, YAML, 960, Blueprint
• Exceptional Performance Tips, YSlow, Hammerhead
• Fix your picture sizes with smushit.com
• Page widgets (things that HTML doesn’t have): YUI, jQuery UI
• Build an own search engine with Yahoo BOSS
• YouTube API
• Amazon S3 for storage
• Batch video conversion with Amazon S3 and EC2
• Captioning on a shoestring with CastingWords
• Mechanical Turk

We just had an interesting meeting here discussing plans of how to provide translations of our documentations in different languages. I am a big fan of documentation and have given several presentations talking about the why and how of good docs. In essence the “good code explains itself” talk is a big fat arrogant lie. You should never expect the people using your code to be on the same level as you – that would defeat the purpose of writing code.

Fact is that far too much software has no proper documentation at all let alone translations into different languages. This is because there a few issues with translating documentation:

• Price – translation is expensive, which is why companies started crowdsourcing it.
• Quality – crowdsourcing means you need to trust your community – a lot (looking at Facebook’s translation app shows a lot of translation agency spam in the comments – not a good start)
• Updating issues – in essence, you are trying to translate a moving target. With books, courses and large enterprise level software the documentation is fixed for a certain amount of time. With smaller pieces of software and APIs the docs change very frequently and you need to find a way to alert the translators about the changes. If you crowdsourced your translation this is a request on top of another request!
• Keeping sync – different translations take a different amount of time. Translating English to German is pretty straight forward whereas English to Hindi or Mandarin is a tad trickier. This means that translations could be half finished when the main docs change – which is terribly frustrating to those who spent the time translating now outdated material.
• Relevancy – your documentation normally spans your complete offer – however in different markets some parts of your product may not be available or make any sense. Translating these parts would be pointless, but it also means that tracking the overall progress of translation becomes quite daunting.

All of these are things to consider and not that easy to get around. Frankly, it is very easy to waste a lot of time, effort and money on translation. It makes me wonder if there really is a need for translation or if it doesn’t make much more sense to invest in a localisation framework. What you’d actually need to make your English product available for people in other locations is:

• Local experts – this could be someone working for you or a group of volunteers that see the value of your product for their markets.
• Easy access collaboration tools – this could be a wiki, a mailing list or a forum. Anything that makes it easy for people to contribute in their language and with their view of the world. If these tools make collaboration easy without having to jump through hoops people will help you make your product more understandable in their region.
• A local point of reference – this could be a blog or small presence of your company in the local language or a collaboration with an already established local partner or group.
• Moles – most international developer communities have their favourite hangouts already. Instead of building one that might not be used (not every country is going “wahey” when a US company offers them a new channel) it makes sense to have people who speak that language and that you trust be on these channels, listen to what people need and offer the right advice pointing to your documentation.

What do you think? do you have examples of where this is done well and what worked and didn’t work? Here are two I found:

• Opera’s web Curriculum is translated by editors
• Facebook has a translation app in Facebook