Last updated a year ago
Despite a population of billions, East Asia is underrepresented in Catalyst due to a lack of localized content and Town Hall participation.
Setup a translation pipeline to translate Catalyst documents & proposals to various languages in East Asia as accurately as possible.
This is the total amount allocated to Onboarding East Asia Today.
Our objective is to build and document a streamlined process for content translation and start the development of localized content. We have already set up a simple translation pipeline [ 1 ] using Git, GitLocalize, and GitHub Actions.
Our initial objective is to get existing Project Catalyst Fund series content translated into their respective local language of the communities represented in Eastern Town Hall.
We will grow from there by translating various existing Cardano and Catalyst material into three to four languages of the current community in the Eastern Town Hall using a semi-automated system, and gaining experience and building community. 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, having it worked on by someone, reviewed, and then published.
We will start to embrace and extend the excellent localization documentation processes established by the Kubernetes SIG Docs group [ 2 ] to help us. We are adapting the processes to accommodate the varying technical skills and future directions we want to take.
This recurring proposal is submitted to continue the widely accepted and anticipated prototype DAO program of the Eastern Town Hall (ETH), which is Compensated Community Translation. Through the usage of GitHub and GitLocalize, we have seen very enthusiastic participation by 2 (two) communities, Indonesian and Viet Nam. Through the data we have gained, we foresee the continuation of this system and perhaps the widespread use of it, either for social causes or business applications. Some metrics are as following and can be found on our GitLocalize [ 3 ] also :
In Indonesia, these are the following metrics;
Across the majority of the Eastern Hemisphere, English is not routinely spoken on a daily basis. Instead, a web of regional languages is used throughout the social and business etiquettes.
These language barriers reduce participation in Catalyst. It limits the potential growth of Cardano adoption and utility in this region. We have experienced this first hand, and we hear this from our communities, and through the pipeline translation we have already developed, more and more individuals from those communities are starting to understand what drives Cardano and Project Catalyst. From this knowledge, they are able to formulate a proposal, though at times might not yet be acceptable by the community, it is an auspicious result.
This can easily be seen by the number of community development members from Indonesia and the number of proposals submitted from Viet Nam and Japan.
Seeing that this is very much a community-driven effort, creating a system that balances community engagement, high-quality translation and speed of translation will require numerous workshops/educational materials. It can be foreseen that numerous iterations and trial and error will be needed.
Another aspect that will pose a challenge is fine tuning the reward/compensation system that accommodates various economic standards throughout the Eastern Hemisphere. This also correlates towards the education level that differs from one nation to another. Some might have a grasp on English as a second language, therefore, rendering this translation pipeline not as alluring as other countries.
This might have an effect on creating a universal conclusion on the efforts of this proposal. The acceptance or disregard of this translation pipeline in itself is data from which we can gain knowledge.
To further grow the this Compensated Community Translations, these are our action plans to be executed by appointing all members of the team whose communities are deeply engaged in the ETH pre-DAO program :
These actions will translate into the following timeline :
The following is our budget breakdown that of our action plans spanning 3 months :
The team represents the initial Eastern Town Hall (ETH) Trusted Seed and incoming new members.
There are no roles, no leaders. Rather people establish themselves over time, through participation. We overlap and collaborate with Catalyst Swarm [ 4 ] and Catalyst School [ 5 ] and other community groups across Asia.
This collaborative effort brings a wealth of cultural and technical experience to Cardano. We are all very active in Catalyst, and community groups across our ecosystem. We are a diverse bunch united by the promise of Cardano : (in alphabetic order)
Yes, we will submit proposal in the next Catalyst Fund to operate our Town Hall, as this Town Hall operates to build communities in each countries of Eastern Hemisphere zone in the long run.
Since we are using Git and GitHub for the Eastern Town Hall planning, organization, documentation, metrics are derived from GitHub activity and engagement.
Key Metric: Project Velocity [ 6 ], 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 [ 7 ] for the Eastern Town Hall website to measure how our work is being spread and used in the Cardano ecosystem
This indeed is a proposal continuation of the continuously funded Eastern Town Hall proposal spanning from Fund 6, 7, 8 and now 9.
Previous proposal: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/399478
Additional information
By close communication, coordination and collaboration with the Catalyst Swarm, The Catalyst School, the Ambassadors Guild and the Bridge Builders, we build a Network of Community initiatives able to provide an A to Z onboarding process which allows newcomers to appreciate a fast and safe onboarding process.
We have also set up an Eastern Town Hall Stake Pool (C3ETH) and are part of the Ryuuki Fund and Network.
References
[1] Eastern Town Hall GitHub and Translation pipeline : https://github.com/C3ETH/c3eth.github.io/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3ATranslation%3AContent
[2] Kubernetes SIG Docs group : https://kubernetes.io/docs/contribute/localization/#minimum-required-content
[3] Eastern Town Hall GitLocalize Translation pipeline : https://gitlocalize.com/repo/6430
[4] Catalyst Swarm : http://catalystswarm.com
[5] Catalyst School : https://linktr.ee/CatalystSchool
[6] Project Velocity : https://chaoss.community/metric-project-velocity
[7] Orbit : https://github.com/orbit-love/orbit-model
NB: Monthly reporting was deprecated from January 2024 and replaced fully by the Milestones Program framework. Learn more here
Cardano Foundation Ambassadors, Catalyst School & Eastern Town Hall Members, Proposal Assessors (PAs) & Veteran PAs, Challenge Team members, Cardano Stake Pool Operators (SPO), IT & Software Engineering, Blockchain Devs, Plutus/Atala Prism Pioneers, Educators and Accountants