Creating as much Japanese interface as possible to be more inclusive of native Japanese speakers

Question

This issue came up before, but it seemed to me the focus was on the content of questions and answers. I think when it comes to content, this is a site targetted at English speakers wanting to learn Japanese, and that part is working out fine. The backbone of most questions is in English, and the target is Japanese, and that all makes sense.

However, I think there's an issue in that, possibly more than most Stack Exchange communities, we are hobbled by the fact that a lot of people who could potentially provide good answers and might enjoy being a part of this are hesitant because of the English interface around all the discussion.

Using SE takes some getting used to. A person who might be able to read enough English to answer a question about Japanese doesn't necessarily want to read all sorts of instructions in English on how to get to those questions. The implications of voting a question up or down, what to do with error messages, what the badges mean... all those kinds of things are not so self evident, and the level of effort required to work them out might be too high when it requires also struggling through English.

It's an issue of friction. I know myself that even though I can read Japanese, I sometimes skim and skip over Japanese web sites that might otherwise be interesting for me to participate in just because it can be just a little too tiring to read all the Japanese required just to make the initial steps in.

It seems that full localization is not going to happen soon on JLU, so I'm wondering if there's any way we can create a FAQ, an introduction, a guide, or something in Japanese that acts a sort of entry way and assistance for people who are native Japanese speakers.

I think the scale and activity of the community is fine, even though we're not ripe for getting out of Beta status yet. I'm only proposing that we consider ways of enticing people who can expand the pool of quality answers.

So, all in all, what I'm saying is, until such a time as a user can choose their UI language, can we create an intro page and/or set of instructions in Japanese to help pave the way for Japanese speakers to put their energy into the questions and answers, and not the interface?

I'm willing to start writing such an intro/guide, but I wouldn't know where to put it...

Answer 1

Note: The Japanese localization project has been moved to StackApps and GitHub, so for more up-to-date information please visit https://stackapps.com/questions/2978/japanese-stack-exchange-localization and https://github.com/cyphr/Stack-Exchange-Japanese-Localization.

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Old, now out-of-date text: I've started creating a demonstration localization into Japanese for this website using a JavaScript user script that can be used with Greasemonkey. It can be downloaded from http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/122087.

• There are probably lots of translation errors, but you have to start from somewhere.
• A lot of the interface has been internationalized, including the toolbars/tabs/buttons/links etc. I've tried to convert the SE dates/times to the Japanese format.
• I tried to translate around 2/6 pages of of the most common tags. The badges used by 10 or more people on the main JLU website have also been translated. The "tag details" popup on tag links doesn't currently work once the tags have been localized, I think because it needs the original text inside them.
• The tabs in the user profile page don't work as expected the first time they're clicked for now, I might try to fix that later and I haven't tried to translate a lot of the longer explanations, for example the longer help explaining the MarkDown editor etc yet.

Anyway, I think I'll leave it as it is for now, but I'm interested in everyone's opinions. Do you think it's viable/a good idea etc?

Here's a quick screenshot of what it currently looks like for people without Firefox and Greasemonkey:

Answer 2

Is your proposal only about a sort of translation of the FAQ, as your question-body suggests, or also the whole site, so even the buttons, the section titles, etc. as your title suggests? I'm not sure I understood that completely...

For the second thing, the "problem" is also the implementing phase, so after the translations are provided, who takes care about the site would need to include a "language-change" option and translate all the strings (i.e. the parts of text in the code that we see as "Post your answer") from English to Japanese.

For the first thing instead, i.e. the FAQ, it would be much simpler and I agree with the proposal cypher made in the comments, and actually I was coming to say that same thing. :P

So my suggestion would be this one:

Post a link in the FAQ (the text-link would be in Japanese I suppose) to a Meta Post, possibly locked. I say locked because only Mods should be able to modify it, as the FAQ are only editable by Mods.

Note that I'm not saying only Mods can write and create those FAQ, this will be done by the community as a whole. I am saying that possible updates of the FAQ must be made by the Mods, so you avoid random people editing randomly and risking ruining the FAQ.

Some might ask, why not post it directly in the FAQ?

That's a good question, but that would unnecessarily clutter the FAQ section that, in case you don't know, has only one part that is editable, the first one. So you'd have a FAQ in English, then the same in Japanese (here finished the editable part) then again in English... It would create unnecessary cluttering, in my opinion.

If you disagree or if I'm missing something, please comment! :)