Update: Making our website, docs, and overall product friendly in other languages continues to be a strategic priority for our Global Support Team. Huge kudos for the major milestone @ibacher achieved recently with streamlining our Transifex flows!!
In the meantime there have been 3 other, simpler milestones I’ve been looking into:
- More Diverse SEO: Making our English site results show up in Search Engine queries in other languages via automated plugin → Now done: last week I finished setting up a membership that helps improve our website’s SEO by automatically translating our content so the search results show up even if you search in other languages. (I was hearing that Francophone countries were not seeing OpenMRS even in very relevant searches.) But now, with this new tool, if someone searches for relevant terms like “open source medical records” in their native language, OpenMRS is more likely to show up in their Google results - as shown in this one case with Russian:
This has only been live for about 4 days but the initial results are very interesting:
The other two goals are in progress:
- Auto-translate option for our Confluence / Wiki docs: we can explore some plugins once we finish our migration to Confluence Cloud.
- Auto-translate option for Talk posts: this plugin looks promising; have asked @dkayiwa and @burke to add it on. Discourse translator | Discourse - Civilized Discussion
Of course I’m aware the gold standard would be to have professional translation for all of this, but given our limited resources, all these automated tools seem like no-brainer, low-hanging fruit that very much support our mission of a globally friendly product and community.