Support in your native language

Many software users aren't fluent in communicating in English. It is common that a user has enough understanding of English to find his or her way around Launchpad, but not enough to explain in detail a problem he has. For these users, the Launchpad Answer Tracker allows asking a question in their native language.

But allowing a user to ask a question in French won't help him unless there is somebody that also speaks French to answer the question. To this end, the Answer Tracker allows tracking the languages spoken by the support community, and matches questions made in a specific language to people that can speak it.

Setting your languages preferences

Launchpad is usually good at guessing the languages that you are likely to speak. It uses the list of languages accepted by your browser, as well as information on the languages spoken in the country related to the IP adress you are connecting from. So if you have configured your browser for the languages you speak, Launchpad will use the same list.

When Launchpad guesses wrong, you can tell it explicitly the languages you speak by visiting the 'Preferred Languages' page available from your personal Launchpad page.

Filling a bug in your native language

To ask a question in a language other than English, the same procedure as usual is used. The only difference is that you'll change the question's language in the Language drop down: you will be able to select among your preferred languages. (See the previous section for information on how this list is computed and how to change it.) It is as simple as that!

You may get a warning message when asking a question in a language which the community doesn't support. This means that the language you wrote the question in isn't spoken by any of the registered answer contacts for this project. You can still create the question in that language, for it is possible that users not registered as answer contacts speak your language. But if you proceed, consider that you are less likely to get an answer than if you used English or another supported language.

Providing support in your native language

When you come to your favourite project to help other users, you'll see all the questions in English as well as the ones in one of your preferred languages. A notice will be displayed if there are questions in other languages that you don't see. There is a checkbox that allows you to display all of the questions regardless of their language.

To help users in your native language, the procedure is the same as for English: you just go on the question you want to reply to, enter your message and click the appropriate button. You should enter your message in the same language than the original question.

If you registered as an answer contact, you should configure your preferred languages through Launchpad. Even if Launchpad guesses your preferred languages correctly, you should go to your person page and select them in the Preferred Languages section, because it's only from these settings that Launchpad computes the list of supported languages for a project. (So if you do support in French but don't set that language in your Preferred Languages page, users posting question in that language may get an 'Unsupported language' warning, even though they shouldn't.)

As an answer contact, you'll receive email notifications only about questions written in English or one of your preferred languages. So you won't receive notification on questions in languages you don't understand. The only exception to this is when a new question is asked in an unsupported language. You'll receive a notification about that fact -- and it's up to your community to find people that can speak that language to help the end-users out.