Allow provide translations for new languages

[kant2002]

I believe that novices better learn in their native languages, so I have question and request.

What if I provide translation for Ukrainian language for templates. Can this successfully land main branch? I understand that MS may not want to be responsible for translation, but that seems to be good community project (for other languages for sure too)

After that I ping @baronfel on Discord and here our conversation

@baronfel

the initial response was that we likely weren't going to be able to accept community contributions immediately due to concerns about the longer-term maintenance of them, but I'm reaching out to our Localization folks. if they have bandwidth to take on a new language and are open to accepting the maintenance of the translations, that changes the conversation a bit from Microsoft's side

@kant2002 (me)

Thank you. What do you think would be appropriate place issue on the matter?

@baronfel

dotnet/sdk would be appropriate. I had a thought this morning - right now in the SDK for .NET 7 we made a change so that open-source distributions of the SDK (such as those made by Canonical, Red Hat, etc) do not enable telemetry by default. We could continue this story of making the SDK more of a standalone, OSS-friendly product if there was some way to define easily what subset of languages were bundled. That would allow MS builds of the SDK to only take localization that MS felt met a given quality bar, while allowing a more open-to-contribution model for localizations outside that set.

That's great idea. And personally I'm all for a way to MS maintain quality, at the same time allow contributors build-up content over time. Since that would be volunteering work, I do not expect that things would start working immediately, but I think there other languages which may join bandwagon.

[dotnet-issue-labeler]

I couldn't figure out the best area label to add to this issue. If you have write-permissions please help me learn by adding exactly one area label.

[danmoseley]

I think the idea of a community released translation pack (community authored and built) is really interesting. It need not include all strings (just the ones it does need to be up to date). Is there any precedent for this in the .NET ecosystem?
cc @terrajobst @richlander @shanselman

[vlada-shubina]

Templates can be localized to any language in fact, however localizations has to be bundled in the template definition in template package.

[kant2002]

@vlada-shubina My understanding that templates is just regular Nuget packages which pack everything inside folder https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/tree/main/template_feed/Microsoft.DotNet.Common.ProjectTemplates.7.0 (for example) and do not add additional metadata as part of the build. If that's true, then non-approved can be excluded from the build package. Am I miss something bigger in packaging scheme of things?

[vlada-shubina]

I meant the 3rd party template packages which are not shipped by Microsoft. The template author can include any language they want and if they match the locale settings the template information will be displayed in that language.
Localizing Microsoft templates is still subject to this discussion.

[kant2002]

I meant the 3rd party template packages which are not shipped by Microsoft.

I think I understand what do you mean, but let me rephrase. Does that mean that currently you can create new Nuget package with templates for specific language?

From what I'm aware of in addition to existing frictions (like dotnet new -i UA.DotNet.Web.Spa.ProjectTemplates) somebody has to have different name for templates in the console. Like dotnet new uaconsole. That's probably defeat whole idea, because it's uphill battle for building new language ecosystem without relying on docs of other languages (like English).
If somehow language side-loading would be allowed it allow gradually translate parts based on the user needs. I may overestimate ability of community to do that obviosuly.

Localizing Microsoft templates is still subject to this discussion.

I understand that. just trying to understand what's other solution proposed. Thanks for clarifications