Re: translations of documentation
On Sun, Nov 08, 1998 at 10:39:58PM -0500, Adam Di Carlo wrote:
>
> > The Debian web pages themselves are a different story. Every
> > language that so desires can have their own source directory in
> > which they can translate pages. Now that an annoying bug in apache
> > has been found, it works quite well.
>
> The problem with that scheme, for me, is that there is no "intra-page"
> sharing of information. I.e., if I have a chart of Debian archive
> directory structure, this has to be "cut-n-pasted" between language
> versions.
>
Not true. Since the pages are generated using wml, we can and do use
it's capabilities to remove as much of the non-textual information
from the pages.
A good example is the vendors page. There is a bit of text at the top
that must be translated into each language. Other than that, there simply
needs to be a list of the phrases used in the rest of the document in
each language. Once these two items have been translated, the maintainer
of the list of vendors can add new vendors without even consulting
the translation team.
Additionally, seperate directories were used for each language because
we don't have the resources to guarantee synchronization of the translations
(synoptism in the paper). Under the system translators can translate as
much or as little of the site as they wish. This all could have been done
just as easily in a single directory tree, but it was felt that the large
number of files in each directory would have been awkward.
Jay Treacy
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