[Tails-ux] Stats on languages used in Tails sessions

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Author: sajolida
Date:  
To: Tails user experience & user interface design, Public mailing list about the Tails project
Subject: [Tails-ux] Stats on languages used in Tails sessions
>From the check of the security update feed (tails-security-check),
we also know in which language the session is started. This way we can
localize the security update notifications. I did some stats on logs I
had from January, March, and April.

The top 10 languages are:

1    English        76.66%
2    German        31.12%
3    Russian        26.59%
4    French        16.67%
5    Spanish         6.68%
6    Italian         3.77%
7    Portuguese     3.27%
8    Polish         2.55%
9    Low German     2.20%
10    Japanese     1.77%


* I attribute the presence of Low German to a UX bug caused by our
uncurated list of 284 languages in Tails Greeter. See #17002#note-3.

Simple UX issues like this one can have a huge impact, here hundreds
of users daily would probably have a better time using Tails in German
than Low German, possibly because of the way this list is displayed.

* The languages translated on our website are all in the top-10, except
Farsi. They represent 64% of sessions. Pretty good!

* Farsi has some translation on our website and very good coverage of
our custom software (82%) but very few users (22 sessions in 84 days).

Either Tails is not usable by or relevant for Farsi users, either
Farsi users don't use Tails in Farsi despite our translation work.

* Russian is huge and should be our next goal for the translation of our
website.

* Non-English sessions represent 23% of all sessions.

I don't know how many of these people would have a better time if
Tails was translated in other languages but 23% doesn't seem to be a
lot. We can use this number to track the impact of our localization
efforts.

* All the languages that we defined as our tier-1 languages are in the
top quarter of the list, except Hindi (#86). All our tier-1 languages
have more than 50% of our custom software translated, except Hindi
which has 0%.

This seems to mean that our selection of tier-1 languages is pretty
strong.

It might also mean that our current user base in India is fine with
using Tails in English and don't feel that translating our custom
software into Hindi is important.

* In #16095 we proposed a criteria to curate the list of languages in
Tails Greeter to move from 284 languages to around 50. For a language
to be listed in Tails Greeter it would have to be either:

  - In our list of tier-1 languages
  - Have a PO file in tails.git
    In the future, tails.git will also include greeter.git,
    whisperback.git, and persistence-setup.git. See #7036.


With this criteria we would cover 99.86% of these sessions.

Of the 0.14% left (over 84 days of logs), the top 3 are Estonian,
Bosnian, and Belarusian. For each of these, only looking at the main
menus, GNOME is partly translated but neither Tor Browser nor
Thunderbird are translated at all.

So it looks like this criteria is pretty good as well.

I'm putting the full list of languages in attachment.

--
sajolida
Tails — https://tails.boum.org/
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