Re: Translating NEWS.Debian?

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de>]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 02:05:02PM -0500, Chip Salzenberg wrote:
> I'm in the process of moving some debconf notes into NEWS.Debian to
> fix nfs-utils bug #228365, "debconf abuse".
> 
> However, I'm a bit concerned that non-English-speakers will be unable
> to read NEWS.Debian since there is, AFAIK, no process in place to
> translate it.  Have I missed something, or do we need another (!)
> translation project?

Translations needs the following:
1. a technical infrastructure
2. people doing the translations
3. a defined way to include translations in packages and to keep them 
   up-to-date

There are many things that could be translated, e.g.:
- package descriptions
- program strings
- debconf messages
- NEWS.Debian files
- man pages
- info pages
- other documentation


The technical infrastructure doesn't seem to be an extremely big 
problem.

There seem to be several people that like to do translations.


My impresion regarding debconf messages is:

People send their translations to the package maintainers.

This works with few translations into few languages, but I don't think 
this scales well considering that it might happed that there are 
translations from 10 000 packages into 100 languages.

When discussing what else can be translated, please also discuss how to 
get these translations into the packages in a way that scales well.


cu
Adrian

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed