Eastern Town Hall Language Support

General Summary

East Asia nations with its population of billions are a mix of untapped and yet to be fulfilled potential in the adoption of Cardano. Recent findings show interest in blockchain across the regions is on a high uptick. Of Singaporean crypto holders, 40% of their holdings consist of Cardano, while in Australia of all their crypto holders, those that own Cardano is at 26,4% while in Indonesia that number is at 23,5%.

This indicates people in this region are excited about Cardano yet still have not been totally exposed to the larger Cardano ecosystem and the opportunities it can provide. This can be simply shown by the number of proposals coming from these regions in Project Catalyst. There is a difference between holding and adopting. In the case of adoption, education on Cardano and it's ecosystem is crucial.

Current Limitations

Across East Asia regions, English on average is not routinely spoken. Regional languages dominate day-to-day interactions. Catalyst's limited ability to provide documentation and onboarding processes that are tuned to the individual regional languages across these nations hinders participation and meaningful adoption. Two elements that will further propel Cardano to be the leading blockchain.

Eastern Town Hall experiences this, Eastern Town Hall is at the forefront of understanding various cultures and languages, Eastern Town Hall continues to evolve from one iteration to another but one core feature will always stay needed, quality content and onboarding guidance in their own languages.

The Team In-depth

This is a total collaborative effort, crossing the globe and organizations. From members of the Catalyst Swarm, Catalyst School, Cardano Foundation, Emurgo to Eastern Town Hall. From France, UK, Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam to New Zealand, the team brings a wealth of cultural and technical experience to Cardano. We are all active in Catalyst, and community groups across our ecosystem. We are a diverse bunch united by the promise of Cardano : (alphabetical order)

Andreas Sosilo @andreassoesilo - Indonesia: Cardano Ambassador with a Software Developer background. Building and increasing adoption of Cardano in the Indonesian community.

Andy Sibuea @zicozibu - Indonesia: Emurgo Indonesia educator and Eastern Town Hall contributor. Leading blockchain education beyond cryptocurrencies and across Indonesia.

Felix Weber @felixweber - France: Cardano Ambassador and Community Manager building bridges between people. Member of the T&M Catalyst Circle v1, Founder of Catalyst Swarm and Co initiator of the Catalyst School.

Linh Pham @linhcardano - Australia: Challenge Team member of Fund 7. Cloud computing, Digital Forensic and Cyber Security academic staff. Co-host for Eastern Town Hall - English/Vietnamese.

Mie Tran @mie.tran.0407 - Vietnam: English and International Business major with experience working with western businesses and translation.

Robert O'Brien @wolstaeb - New Zealand: Financial systems Software Engineer, Community Co-Organiser and Entrepreneur.

Stephen Whitenstall @swhitenstall - England: Founder of QA DAO, Tracks and documents Catalyst. Helping communities like Catalyst Circle and Catalyst Swarm organize.

Nguyen Anh Tien @tienna - Vietnam: Cardano SPO, Payment Systems Developer for major banks, financial institutions and telecommunications providers. Co-host for Cardano Eastern TownHall - English/Vietnamese.

Yan Tirta @yantirta - Indonesia: Cardano Indonesia community wrangler empowering his local community with education and encouragement.

Yuta Yuta @yutazz - Japan: Cardano Ambassador, Community Co-Organiser, Catalyst Fund 2 Recipient, certified public accountant.

The team represents the initial Eastern Town Hall trusted seed. There are no roles, no leaders. Rather people establish themselves over time, through participation. The extended team includes professional interpreters and translators.

Our Solution: Translation Pipeline Automation and Onboarding Mentorships

Our objective is to continue to develop and document a streamlined process for Cardano content translation in the various regional languages in East Asia. We have already set up a functional translation pipeline using GitHub together with GitLocalize for the Eastern Town Hall. This acts as our proof-of-concept and springboard to develop various other translation pipeline platforms for different formats such as YouTube, marketing materials etc.

Our initial objective is simple: to get a lot of existing Cardano and Catalyst material translated into as many languages of the East Asia regions using a semi-automated system. Gaining experience and building community while documenting what we do and how.

By semi-automated system, we do not mean machine translation. While machine translation is helpful as a starting point, it has difficulty with specialized terms and does not read naturally. Human translations will always have a slight advantage. A semi-automated system refers to an ability to queue a piece of work for translation, which may include feeding it through a machine translation service, have it worked on by someone, reviewed, and then published.

We will start to embrace and extend the excellent localisation documentation processes established by Kubernetes SIG Docs group[7] to help us. Adapting the processes to accommodate the varying technical skills and future directions we want to take.

Work Streams

To establish a functioning and sustainable translation pipeline, we are seeking continued funding to help develop the work we have already started. The funding will cover five workstreams:

Continued evaluation of translation services and their integration: with Git, Github, Ideascale, and the Markdown-based documentation efforts of the Cardano Foundation.

Developing iterations of the translation pipeline: The goal is to have a small-scale process in place that is easy enough to follow and requires minimal supervision.

Documenting translation process & development of tutorial material: Embrace and extend the Kubernetes SIG Doc[7] processes to help with our own needs. Developing localised tutorial content to onboard future translators.

Train the trainers: Run training sessions with Eastern Town Hall members to a level of competence in the process such that they can train others.

Translations: Getting up to speed on our workflow is going to require some hands-on tinkering and experience. We aim to continue to translate various selections of Cardano general content, Catalyst Guides, Community Advisor documents, voter education and our own materials. This takes time and effort for each language.

Getting Scale: Earn-to-Learn

Translations and localisation standards, automation, and skills need to be developed so we can outsource localisation to the wider Cardano community. Doing translation and localisation work as a way to get more involved in Cardano and the different communities. Doing translation and localisation work to build a reputation and earn ADA. We see a future that leverages Metadata, Native Assets, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), Machine-Learning, and Atala Prism on the Cardano blockchain to give us language and cultural reach. However, starting simply first.

Collaboration

Translation and localisation of content is a general issue across many groups working in Cardano and Catalyst. We do not plan to do this work alone or exclusively. In the Eastern Town Hall, we are at the forefront of managing many languages and cultures, our plan is to develop practices and automated processes for our own purposes, and share them widely. Everything we learn and do, we hope will inform the Cardano ecosystem at large.

What Success Looks Like

Continuing or previous efforts where the Eastern Town Hall translates Catalyst Proposals as they are finalized. Funded project reports are currently being integrated into the translation pipeline. We are also currently translating, and will be maintaining those translations, of key Cardano and Catalyst documents and guides.

Mid-term we would like to expand the languages translated, and we are actively working with other groups across the Cardano Ecosystem to do this work.

Longer-term success means we've established a whole decentralized workflow for translation and interpretation of any document, video, podcast etc. using the Cardano Network as the coordinating backbone. One of the simplest ways to onboard and earn ADA in the Cardano ecosystem system is to help translate, transcribe or interpret material.

Key Performance Indicators ( KPIs )

Since we are using Git, and Github for the Eastern Townhall planning, organization, documentation, metrics are derived from Github activity and engagement.

Key Metric: Project Velocity[8], defined as a combination of base activity metric of commits and pull-requests taken from Github.

Activity Metrics: captured as project activity in Github and cadence documents added and the speed of translation.

Community Metrics: engagement behaviors broken down into four categories[9] for the Eastern Townhall website, to measure how our work is being spread and used in the Cardano ecosystem.

After One Month:

Eastern Townhall website information architecture has been developed.

Primary content for the initial website has been identified and ported to Markdown.

The entire Eastern Townhall website is translated.

After Three Months:

We have established a semi-automated translation pipeline driven by Git Pull requests.

Evaluated and tested different translation services as a means to simplify translation.

Documented our initial translation process and trained the trainers.

Expanded formats for translations to include video subtitles.

Issuing NFTs for skills, language, and attribution/contribution tracking.

After Six Months:

On-boarding more members of the Cardano Community to do translations.

Added two more Eastern hemisphere languages to our core set.

Tutorial material (documentation and videos) is developed and translated to help onboard new contributors and languages.

After Twelve Months:

All Catalyst Proposals and Funded Projects are translated and published within days of being produced.

We have expanded our core language set to include the ten languages from the Eastern hemisphere.

The translation project is self-sustaining because projects/teams/businesses want to reach our audience in their native language.

The Cardano ecosystem coalesce around similar standards for document management and their translations.

Licensing

All our source code will be licensed under a free and open-source (OSI) license e.g. MIT, and contributions must be contributed patent-free. Contributors will be required to agree to a Contributor Covernant[10].

Published content will be licensed under the Creative Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike International (CC BY-NC-SA) License v4.0. Any meta-data specifications will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) license. Where and when applicable metadata specifications for document identification and provenance will be submitted as Cardano Improvement Proposals.

Code, documentation, project activity is made available on Github or in the future a similar service.

Budget

The requested Fund 6 budget is for wages for three months and six months of expenses. Fifty per cent of funds will be used retrospectively to cover work and expenses we are already undertaking.

Evaluation/Integration of Translation services: $1200 USD

Workflow Automation: $3000 USD

Process Documentation: $2200 USD

Train the Trainers: $850 USD

Translations: $1250 USD

Project Management (%8): $1000 USD

Software Services & Servers: $3000 USD

Post for unexpeted Costs and additional Community Contribution - $2500 USD

Software Services & Servers fees ($500 x 6 months = $3,000) includes the expenses of using a translation service (anywhere from $140USD to $240USD a month) to help streamline translations; Github; website hosting and any servers needed for translation.

This funding only concerns setting up and testing a translation pipeline. Further funds will be requested to continue any work beyond the three month period, either through Catalyst or other means of funding the Eastern Townhall activity.

References

[1] English Proficiency Index: https://www.ef.com/wwen/epi/

[2] Eastern Townhall Catalyst Fund 6 Work: https://c3eth.github.io/catalyst/fund6/

[3] Crowdin - https://crowdin.com/

[4] Lokalize - https://lokalise.com/

[5] PoEditor - https://poeditor.com/

[6] GitLocalize - https://gitlocalize.com/

[7] Kubernetes SIG Docs group- https://kubernetes.io/docs/contribute/localization/#minimum-required-content

[8] Project Velocity: https://chaoss.community/metric-project-velocity/

[9] Community Metrics: https://communityroundtable.com/best-practices/thecrs-work-out-loud-framework/

[10] Contributor Covernant: https://www.contributor-covenant.org/