On-boarding East Asia Today!

Requested Amount (USD): $12,500

Problem statement

Despite a population of billions, East Asians are underrepresented in Catalyst due to a lack of localised content.

Describe your solution to the problem

Setup a translation pipeline that will translate catalyst documentation & proposals across as many languages in East Asia as possible.

Relevant experience

Co-Founders of Catalyst Swarm, Eastern Townhall, Catalyst School. IT & Software Engineering. educators and accountant in East Asia & Japan.

Detailed plan

East Asia and Southeast Asia region unites culturally and linguistically diverse countries. People in these communities are excited about getting involved in the Cardano ecosystem. Despite having a population of 1.6 Billion, Catalyst has seen very few proposals from East Asia and Southeast Asian regions.

Current Problems and Limitation

Across East Asia and Southeast Asian regions, English is not routinely spoken and a web of regional languages are used [1].

Language barriers reduce participation in Catalyst. It limits the potential growth of Cardano adoption and utility in this region. We experience this, we hear this from our communities. We know Cardano is missing our stories, our energy, and our perspectives of how to use Cardano to increase economic wellbeing.

Proposed Solution: Translation Pipeline and Automation

Our objective is to build and document a streamlined process for content translation and start the development of localised content. We have already set up a simple translation pipeline[2] using Git, Hugo, and Github Actions. We’ve tested several translation services such as Crowdin[3], Lokalize[4], PoEditor[5], and GitLozalise[6] for the Eastern Townhall to help us organise and gain some experience.

Our initial objective is simple: to get a lot of existing Cardano and Catalyst material translated into as many languages of the East and Southeast Asian regions using a semi-automated system. 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 specialised 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 initial funding to help develop the work we have already started. The funding will cover five workstreams:

Evaluation of translation services and their integration: with Git, Github, Ideascale, and the Markdown-based documentation efforts of the Cardano Foundation.
Design, configuration, testing of a 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 Kubernettes 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 Townhall 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 translate a selection of Catalyst Guides, Community Advisor, voter education and our own material. That takes time and effort for each language.

Getting Scale: Earn-to-Learn

To get true scale, 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; learning and earning. 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

Near-term the Eastern Townhall is able to translate and host Catalyst Proposals as they are finalised. Translated for our four initial languages in the Asian region. Funded project reports are integrated and translated too. We have also translated, and maintain 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 decentralised workflow for translation and interpretation of any document, video, podcast etc. using the Cardano Network as the coordinating backbone. Where one of the simplest ways to onboard and earn ADA in the Cardano ecosystem system is to help translate, transcribe or interpret material (no harm in dreaming big!).

Key Performance Indicators

Since we are using Git, and Github for the Eastern Townhall planning, organisation, 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 behaviours 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 translations 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

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.

The Team

A collaborative effort, the team bring 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:

Yuta Yuta (@yutazz) - Japan: Cardano official ambassador, Community Co-Organiser, Catalyst Fund 2 Recipient, certified public accountant.

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

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

Andy Sibuea (@zicozibu) - Indonesia: Leading blockchain education beyond cryptocurrencies and across Indonesia.

Tim O’Brien (@tobrien) - Vietnam: No-code pioneer. Facilitator in East African Townhall (EATH).

Greg Bell (@grebel) - Australia: IT consultant, writing Catalyst Challenges.

Seomon Blub (@seomon) - Austria: IT consultant focused on the people-ware infrastructure for sustainable communities.

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

Stephen Whitenstall (@swhitenstall) - England: Tracks and documents Catalyst. Helping communities like Catalyst Circle and Catalyst Swarm organise.

Felix Weber (@felixweber) - France: Community Manager building bridges between people. Member of the T&M Catalyst Circle/Swarm/School.

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.