(Apologies as I don’t speak or understand any German so I hope I’m posting in the right place…)
I’ve recently started using Ultraschall and absolutely love the project!
However, I find it a struggle to use without English documentation or tutorials and this is something I would really like to work on.
I was thinking of what the best way to do this would be - maybe creating a small English speaking user group on Slack or Telegram?
I’m sure this is something you’ve already discussed…
Would love to hear other input or ideas!
Thanks for your reply Arvid. I wasn’t aware of the friction between commercial and non-commercial audiences and the concerns you shared sound quite valid.
I’ve also had a look at some of the previous conversations with the help of google translate and can see a lot of this was brought up before.
I have a deep dislike for these ideas. You’ll pass them a finger and they’ll eat whole your arm.
Either we do it right or we don’t do it at all.
As long as we lack an “enterprise” support model, I see no benefit in addressing the US in any way. And as I stated several times before: this is my 4th major open source project. With the others it went down the drain as soon as it was about money. I don’t want to see this happen again.
When talking about an english-speaking section for the forum I assume this is about connecting to the Sendegate in general?
If this is just about Ultraschall: You can’t really stop enthusiastic users from promoting it to an English-speaking userbase. But if the people behind the project don’t want to be stuck with support requests once the enthusiasm has run out, it’s indeed best not to open a section for this specific purpose here.
Hi, I use Ultraschall to edit my podcast, I also speak german but English is my main language.
I understand the worries about getting “too popular,” but don’t you want people to use the software you make? I don’t think that there will be any requests to make a separate software based on distinct needs of American vs. German podcast cultures. The Americans can just not use the chapter functions.
The software itself is already in English, it’s just a question of documentation and website. You could even post a big disclaimer that no official support will be given in English.
I tend to disagree. It’s not about the chapter markers. It’s about the routing matrix, for instance:
"I want to use StudioLink but I don’t get it. It’s too complicated! Could we have a chat about it? I run a $dollar business, so shut up and take my money!"
Not to mention class action lawsuites because of lost recordings.
Yep, „just“ the documentation. Please keep in mind: there is no proper written documentation in German, either. It’s badly needed, but we just don’t have time and resources. To make things worse, we don’t even have a german „why Ultraschall“ trailer in German, running for 5 minutes. I pray to the community „we need this, can somebody make this?“ and the feedback is always exactly zero.
So what are the chances, that somebody will translate and re-record my 30 hours of screencasts?
If someone starts a series of englisch screencasts, or writes a wiki documentation I will not stop him. But it wont happen, and we as the core group lack the time, resources and motivation to support a second language for we can’t support German in the first place the way it should be.
Part of the question is if there’s a way to get English speakers involved in the way you are talking about. Speaking for myself it is very easy to translate the website or put together basic technical documentation. Screencasts? Forget it. To be honest - don’t take this the wrong way - I find screencasts and videos to be essentially useless as documentation. They aren’t searchable, they are long, and it’s tough to find what you need in them.
If there is no German documentation, an English one would be preferable to having none at all. But since there is no text to start from, you need people familiar with Ultraschall. If the developers cannot invest the time, it comes down to English-speaking users (probably mostly Germans) that you need to convince to compile their knowledge of the software into a documentation. Maybe start with the content of the screencasts to create a framework that can be expanded. That would help some portion of the German-language community too. But I don’t see how English users not already familiar with Ultraschall will be able to help with this work.
As an aside:
A time-coded transcript will help. Also short screencasts accompanying a documentation are really gold.
Translating the website: yes. Put together basic technical documentation? Well.
A good starting point would be our changelog - already translated to englisch:
Please - don’t. We are trying to set something up like https://docusaurus.io - markdown pages with drag&drop support, GitLab/GitHub backend etc. for a german documentation. But it may take us a while.
I guess a good starting point in the meantime would be english subtitles for Ralf’s Workshop video from the 35C3.
So if anyone’s interested, this would be a great help and beginner’s resource…
