Despite MP having a global community something I think often gets overlooked is the information language barrier that prevents many people engaging fully with the Mina Protocol.
Should we look at setting up a database of community members who would want to help with translations?
We are mostly managing and assisting the Turkish community and there is an official team that make the announcement in Turkish. Don’t know much about the rest of the languages but language specific communities actually require a team to keep it going otherwise they die down after the main hype. I don’t know it’s reasonable or not for mina while I know the Turkish community is one of the biggest ones in crpto and also the top region for having issues with the language barrier. We as a team and a few node operators/community members help out on this. Mostly Talha we are very lucky with having such passionate community members. I think gathering some feedback from communities makes more sense towards some decisions for that kind of database. I believe the official teams also keeping their eye on community for these kind of stuff.
Thanks for your thoughts Emre, great to hear them!
I understand what you are saying and from personal experience I know building communities takes sustained effort and perseverance, especially in the early stages. I was actually just thinking along the lines of a more informal, but efficient way to share information with non-english speaking communities, eg subtitles for MP videos, blog posts, new documents etc.
Thinking about it, we could actually use a section/category on this website for volunteers?
To my knowledge subtitles and blog posts are handled by the official mina TR team while that’s mostly not enough so follow up questions fall to the community group. I like to see some overhaul for better communication but certain aspects are issue with these informal ways. There is no way to exactly monitor and know what’s going on in these language-specific channels. Bad actors might be involved. You can’t make them official otherwise you need a full team to cover it. I am talking about all these considering the few communities I know which are very big ones with +5000 users with the official regional team translating the stuff you mentioned. What you mentioned can be helpful for the other regional communities but translating all that stuff is not simple for just from community to cover. The issue is as soon as something got posted you need to have translated version ready in a short frame or it lost most of its value. The people interested in it mostly see it discuss it in the first few hours (maybe even get it wrong and make wrong assumptions) then when you publish the translated version they are not going to care. This still can be helpful for long term for new community members but then it comes down to User A translated the blog 1 and posted on his blog than user B translated the blog 2 posted on his own blog. Without foundation’s or 01 labs involvement and making it into the main cycle of publishing in an organized matter. It’s very unlikely going to be a high impact.
Thanks for the detailed response Emre. I think you have raised some good points, have put some comments below…
There is no way to exactly monitor and know what’s going on in these language-specific channels. Bad actors might be involved. You can’t make them official otherwise you need a full team to cover it.
Maybe we don’t actually need to create a discussion channel, just a read only channel controlled by MF that the text file / data /info is dropped into? Then from there the community can take it away and publish where-ever the like and they can easily link back to the original source document. True there is potential for bad actors, but that is the case. with or without.
I am talking about all these considering the few communities I know which are very big ones with +5000 users with the official regional team translating the stuff you mentioned.
That’s great for the Turkish community, but there are still large groups of people who aren’t being serviced with any information they can understand. I feel like with regular translated information other communities will grow, hopefully that is the long term objective?
The people interested in it mostly see it discuss it in the first few hours (maybe even get it wrong and make wrong assumptions) then when you publish the translated version they are not going to care.
I think this is a valid point, but it depends on the content… For eg something like a video for running a node, the question is asked multiple times a day in telegram and on discord. If there is a multi-language video that admins can point to, then it frees up time for other discussions and for them to help with other questions. Maybe even the source video file can be shared so other channels/communities can use it.
This still can be helpful for long term for new community members but then it comes down to User A translated the blog 1 and posted on his blog than user B translated the blog 2 posted on his own blog. Without foundation’s or 01 labs involvement and making it into the main cycle of publishing in an organized matter. It’s very unlikely going to be a high impact.
I think this may be true at an early stage, but personally for me the long term goal has to be to empower community members to become ambassadors and flag wavers to support the project, they just need the tools to do that.
If you need spanish help I can, directly or helping people like @Aki , that made an amazing job with his videos.
I am supportive of your idea I bring this up because while this exists that’s not being that helpful at the moment. Maybe they have plans for the future and team’s focus is protocol improvements forks etc. I can’t know the details.
The all the points I bring and showed small issues in aspects because of if that’s going to be coordinated by the foundation. These are the possible issues to face and a community group doing this on their own is a much better way to handle it. If foundations take a step and make investments towards sub-communities that’s great but don’t see it happening. The majority of them do incentives for sub-communities but that’s also a significant overhead for them to evaluate them from time to time
Twitter has recently launched a tool which automatically translates all tweets in your timeline to your preferred language. Considering the distance auto translation technology has walked, this actually doesn’t seem too awkward to me. I should say, (haven’t used the new tool, but) my personal experience with Twitter’s translation function has also been very positive so far.
Maybe something like this could be used for less popular languages as a temporary solution until the community grows enough to implement more natural methods. I am sure many enthusiast investors are already using tools like Google translate to understand MP better but providing it automatically would make their life easier and allow the community grow faster.
Not an expert on the topic but there might be Telegram bots which can copy all the official announcements on the main channel and then translate-paste to the local channels.
Thanks for the great response Serdar, yes I 100% agree if we can do this as a community and just get one with it, it will allow the MF team to focus on other areas. The key solution I feel to a lot of the points being raised is allowing the core team to prioritise time in the right areas.
I think bots do help, and I know a lot of people use them but when you are talking about complicated technical language it is certainly a challenge for bots to translate in a coherent way and a human translation would be more accurate.
My idea is simply for a read-only DOCS channel (or actually even a link to a dropbox or similar folder where .txt / .doc files can be uploaded by the MF and accessed by the community to translate.
@Pete very nice topic. In fact, I think it is very important to establish a management structure not only for language barriers but also for other areas that will affect diversity management. I am ready to contribute to suggestions for improvement in terms of gender equality or financial literacy, while new technologies help us to overcome the language barrier.
I love the thoughtful discussions that are going on here and how everyone is thinking about equal/universal accessibility.
@Pete I’d like to hear more about the read-only channel you mentioned. What kind of channel is this? How would this be different from the existing channels, ex. TG/Discord announcement channels, the blogs on the website, etc.?
@DAOPro Not sure if I have seen you around on Mina’s Discord, but if you’re new – welcome to Mina’s community! Diversity and equity are things we find very important. If you have any ideas or suggestions, please share and feel free to start new threads on them! We’d be interested in hearing them.
Hey @Christine, thanks for the feedback. What I am imagining is a read only category (the same as announcements in Discord - we could actually just create the channel in Discord if it doesn’t quite fit with this forum).
So each time there is a press release / tweet / documentation etc from MF a link to the .txt file or images if applicable can be posted on the read only channel so that community members can take that information away and translate and share.
I acknowledge there is a potential for bad actors to change the text, but if we asked people to include a link back to the original post here (or in Discord) the original document would always be available to reference.
Initially we could use The InterPlanetary File System https://ipfs.io/ to store the text documents, but I could imagine in the future a way that a snapp could be deployed in order to verify that the original text was 100% accurate.
The IPFS could also be used in conjunction with the design agency to allow them to deploy their assets, logos, graphics etc in an easily accessible way for the Community.
Would be great to get your thoughts.