Re: how to help translate?
Hi,
At Wed, 5 Sep 2001 20:31:06 -0700 (PDT),
Junaedi Kartawijaya <milisdebian@yahoo.com> wrote:
> What's the difference between i18n and i10n?
i18n includes many things:
- making softwares translatable
(by using gettext and so on)
- making softwares 8bit clean
(for all people other than ASCII)
- making softwares support multibyte-encodings
(for CJK languages and UTF-8)
- making softwares support combining characters
(for Thai and so on)
- making softwares support bidi (bi-direction)
(for Hebrew, Arab, and so on)
- making softwares locale-sensible
(by calling setlocale())
- making softwares support complex language input (XIM and so on)
- and so on
There are "good" l10n and "bad" l10n. "bad" l10n is not
extensible to other languages (for example, hard-coding
a specific encoding or language). Forget about this.
A "good" l10n is based on i18n and includes:
- translation
- locale-dependent management of expression of day and time
- locale-dependent management of
- and so on
Please note "locale" includes many categories such as
LC_CTYPE, LC_COLLATE, LC_MESSAGES, LC_MONETARY, LC_NUMERIC,
and LC_TIME.
> I'm interested in doing some translation to Indonesian
> (id) for Debian. Has someone started it? If yes, how
> to contact the person (may be the coordinator)?
At first, you have to check the encoding for Indonesian.
I mean, ISO-8859-1, Big5, KOI8-R, and so on. If your
encoding is simple 8bit one, you only have to translate.
If your encoding is "complex" one with multibyte characters,
combining characters, or bidi characters, you will want to
add support of them to softwares at first. I think you
can do this work (translation and improvement of softwares)
with upstream developers of each software.
Please check http://www.debian.org/international
for each language. I cannot find Indonesian there.
So, I think you have to be a cordinater. Note that
this page is mainly related to translation of Debian
web pages.
> I see there are some i10n for Russian, Spanish, etc..
> But, what are usually being translated here?
Things which need translations:
- Debian specific
- web pages (http://www.debian.org)
- documents (installation instruction and so on)
- "Description" field for packages (see http://auric.debian.org/~grisu)
- not Debian specific
- software messages ("No such file or directory" in your language)
- manpages and info pages
> Secondly, AFAIK when someone involved in the
> development, someone certainly has good access to
> Internet. Is it possible for person like that don't
> have good Internet access, to get involved?
Depends on what they do. All developers will want to read and write
mails. However, mail requires rather slow connection. Translator
of Debian web and documents will need CVS, which also don't require
fast connection. If you are interested in developing softwares and
packages, you will have to download the upstream version and upload
your package. It depends on the size of the package.
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
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