Hi,
just a general idea/question. Did you ever consider to integrate support for other languages by having the community translate the web frontend and then give the user the option to choose his language?
Nowadays many people speak English just fine, but especially when it comes to accepting a department wide tool which can ease the whole deployment and release management process the way Octopus Deploy does, it most likely will bring in non-technical people that define their processes in their mother tongue. They might show more acceptance to change and automation when they can access the necessary information in their own language and use it to communicate with others.
Even though I never integrated a translation tool myself which allows what I’m suggesting, I know that there are tools out there e.g. http://angular-gettext.rocketeer.be/
Since I don’t know much about the internal structure of Octopus Deploy apart from what I read on http://octopusdeploy.com/blog/octopus-2.0-ui-release-creation-angular-grunt-responsiveness this is only a general idea and there might be better ways to achieve the suggested scenario.
Best regards!
Maik
Hi Maik!
Thanks for the suggestion; we’d very much like to be able to use multiple languages in Octopus. The main barrier currently is our ability to support non-English-speaking customers - while there are first-line support options we could consider, the highly-technical nature of the product makes is challenging to give “gold standard” first-class user support in multiple languages.
At some future point this may become feasible for us, we’ll definitely continue to keep it in mind.
If there are key aspects of the product (e.g. deployment success emails, approval steps etc.) where we could offer limited multi-lingual support that may also be something for us to look at - interested in your thoughts here!
Thanks again,
Nick
Hey Nick,
sorry for not getting back to you sooner!
I understand the problem and complexity behind it and I’m not sure how to solve it. I’ve seen sites before which have some kind of community translation project going on.
I just googled and can’t suggest a particular software, but something like http://translation.steampowered.com/ might give you a basic idea (the FAQ is quite interesting).
Not sure how these projects are managed and maintained though. I guess the main problem besides the technical integration would be to make sure that the translated texts are correct and of course not offensive. I can think of a few scenarios where it might shed a bad light on you or the product if there is no control and validation. Maybe there would need to be a few people per language and some sort of voting process and moderators.
But I think that the ability to have step template parameters with their own language independent labels is a good start for now, we make extensive use of that feature. That way we can for example map step parameters to non-English software versions like IIS or our own products and give the Octopus users the option to interact with well known environments and minimize the need to translate to English and back. In my eyes it’s not less about being able to speak English, but more about bridging the communication gap within a company and it’s different divisions which all could benefit from a central tool like Octopus. 
Thanks again for the great product you guys created!
Best regards,
Maik