cPanel 106 removes almost all translations

[monarobase]

cPanel 106 moved to the CURRENT branch and removes all translations except English, Spanish, German and Russian.

Translations | cPanel Blog

As we roll out Jupiter throughout the end-user interface of cPanel & WHM, we’ve received consistent feedback that the state of our translations needs attention. Though we briefly mentioned translations in a previous blog post, we want to dive a bit deeper into the topic, provide some additional...

blog.cpanel.com

First and foremost, we need to acknowledge the customers who have sent in feedback about our translations. We’ve heard you loud and clear.

Customers who complained translations were not complete or poor quality did not expect cPanel to completely remove all translations!

Some of the current missing translations are :
- French (necessary for our customers)
- Portugese
- Arabic
- Chineese

This change means that cPanel is no longer usable to most non-English-speaking users.

We have been asking for a way to maintain non-English translations in our own language (French) for a long time now. cPanel has refused to provide a way for their customers to help with translations and has now completely removed all translations.

cPanel did not warn us that French translations would be removed in version 106.

Can cPanel please provide a public ETA for when languages will be added back and also provide a public workaround for customers who have servers that were automatically updated to 106 without realising that languages were going to be removed?

These customers are numerous and have customers who don't speak English and who have their documentation in their native language.

 

[cPanelAdamF]

Behind the scenes, we've been working on our localization system to enable 100% translation coverage, including complex strings that were never previously translatable. After completing that work, we are now contracting with professional translators to complete the supported languages you listed and entirely re-translate a handful of more languages, French included. While I can't give an ETA on the replacement translations, please know that we're working to minimize that time as best we can.

In the interim, you can restore the previous French translation by downloading and installing them from GitHub - CpanelInc/cplocales: Locales for cPanel & WHM.

 

[monarobase]

Why did you need to remove all old translations? Was it not possible to keep old ones until the new ones are ready?

 

[cenourinha]

Hope you revert this situation. You should only remove the old translations when you have the new ones ready. What you are doing doesn't make any sense...

 

[DennisMidjord]

I agree. Removing something because you plan to improve it later doesn't make any sense.
Why not keep the current translations (however terrible some of them might be) and then replace them once you actually have something to replace them with?

I can't believe that decision was made by a team. It must've been made by a single person, without ever being mentioned to anyone. Had that decision been mentioned just once, someone from cPanel would surely have asked: "But why?"

 

[cPanelAdamF]

All translations that were removed suffered from a number of problems, including lack of completeness (some as bad as 0%), terrible quality, rampant inconsistency in terminology, and string corruption. Some of those languages were found to have translations for strings we no longer have in the product as well, further complicating our understanding of coverage.

The decision was made to remove them entirely in order to stop "over-promising" the support we offer. In my opinion, providing a bad experience is worse than declaring, if temporarily, that we don't provide an experience at all.

The languages that remain were actively updated since the pandemic and, upon completion, will cover ~85% of our detectable userbase. (Enable participation in the cPanel Analytics » Interface Analytics program on your servers to help us detect more of our user-base and update our understanding.) We also have enabled end-users to tell us directly what languages we should translate into with an in-app survey found wherever languages are listed throughout :2083 and :2087.

To get that ~85% number beyond 95%, we are pursuing translations into Portuguese (which itself would jump the support to 90%), Turkish, French, German and Indonesian. Based on preliminary results from v106's in-app survey, we may add Arabic and Chinese to that list.

 

[cenourinha]

Please, make sure you include pt_PT and not only pt_BR.

 

[DennisMidjord]

Some of those languages were found to have translations for strings we no longer have in the product as well

Didn't the English language include strings that were nowhere to be found as well?
I started translating cPanel and used the English language as a template. There were a lot of strings that I had never seen before.

Why not provide system administrators with an option to manually add the removed languages?
A few customers will prevent us from being able to upgrade. They're old and don't know much English. They've used the Danish translation of cPanel for years and that was fine for them, even though it had a few (very few) issues.

 

[monarobase]

It’s not possible to enable cPanel’s interface analytics program for countries in the EU because of GDPR. All big companies in the EU will probably have it disabled by default. Especially as it also makes user experience for non English users worse by asking them to accept a text en English.

 

[cPanelAdamF]

Please, make sure you include pt_PT and not only pt_BR.

Can do, though please understand that pt_PT may not be first out of the gate. I do see pt_PT users in the analytics we are referring to when generating the list.

 

[cPanelAdamF]

It’s not possible to enable cPanel’s interface analytics program for countries in the EU because of GDPR. All big companies in the EU will probably have it disabled by default. Especially as it also makes user experience for non English users worse by asking them to accept a text en English.

We understand. Participation is totally optional. We also survey (both from our newsletters, direct conversation with customers/partners, and now in the product UX) so that we can learn from there as well.

 

[cPanelAdamF]

Didn't the English language include strings that were nowhere to be found as well?
I started translating cPanel and used the English language as a template. There were a lot of strings that I had never seen before.

Why not provide system administrators with an option to manually add the removed languages?
A few customers will prevent us from being able to upgrade. They're old and don't know much English. They've used the Danish translation of cPanel for years and that was fine for them, even though it had a few (very few) issues.

You can indeed manually restore the removed languages, if you'd like to do that. Instructions are in my previous post.

...and yes, the english translation had more strings in it than appeared in either cPanel & WHM proper or any of the plugins we ship. As part of the work on our translation pipeline, we completely reset and "re-harvested" strings from our main codebases in order to get that number more accurate and have a better picture of upcoming translation costs.

 

[cenourinha]

I think the best option would be to use a tool like Weblate to allow translations to be open and created collaboratively by cPanel users. I already helped translate many software in the last years and that would allow us to contribute and accelerate the availability of those languages.

 

[lucianozanita]

It's a shame to remove everything and then put it back, it would be better, as the dear colleague above said, for the community to help in a collaborative way for the translation, than to remove everything and not have anything translated into Brazilian Portuguese or from Portugal.

cPanel is not a new platform, it's something old and mature to make a drastic change like this.

 

[Otavio]

This change is causing some concern, for example: PT_BR even though the current translation is deficient, it makes no sense to remove 100%


I believe the approach should be correction before removal.


cpanel is unfortunately ignoring its community once again.

These unilateral decisions are having negative impacts on their clients' operations.


It would be much more valid to open votes injected within the cpanel itself so that the user himself will decide which decisions will be more useful.

 

[UAhosting]

Please add the Ukrainian language to the survey. In our country, according to the law, all interfaces must be in Ukrainian.

 

[tpmpropaganda]

simply, soon they will start charging for the language we need, just like plesk

 

[cPRex]

@UAhosting - noted!

@tpmpropaganda - definitely not something we are planning.

 

[Ex2inc]

@cPRex
Not sure if it's necessary given you have already mentioned you are working on French, but it might be a good idea to add it to the survey as well.

 

[nlaruelle]

Oops. I also missed that information prior the update from my side.

I did not get any notifications by updating to v106 about the removal of the French for instance… or it was not obvious at the first time for me ?
However, I read carefully the big update notices after each cPanel updates, but I should probably read better the bêta release notes.

Globally, that was nice to get the solution on the forum (thanks for that, it works good in minutes),
but for this concern, I'll have liked to get this link through a notification from my WHM or something more visible.
I am afraid that many "Providers" will remain without their favorite languages for a while, before discovering the easy workaround here (not all "End-User" report missing languages and just think their provider switch to english panel).

If possible to get more communication for updates which makes consequences on our customer service and reputation please! It would be perfect

Long life to Jupiter!