live-manual style guide
Hi guys,
For your consideration / esteemed perusal.
I found this (a bit outdated) todo on the wiki http://live.debian.net/devel/live-manual/todo/ and decided to have a go and write a style guide for live-manual.
It is open for improvement but I think that this could pretty much be it (Except for the links). It includes a couple of scraps gathered from irc and as for the rest, it is to a large extent written applying discourse analysis techniques. Just for the curious http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_analysis
Since it *already* is a very long text I have refrained from adding long explanations or even examples unless I considered it necessary. I have in fact deleted most examples from the original text to lighten it a bit.
I include the shortlog/index in this message for future references. The full text is temporarily found following this link below (Editable by anyone. Feel free to cut, edit, add comments or examples, critiques ...)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dxnbHAz0L1LE-4WHVbunQj9YF0pD-WvlG-SL87b_iwc/edit?pli=1
THIS IS THE SHORTLOG/INDEX:
live-manual style guide
SHORTLOG
1.- General guidelines for authors
1.1 Linguistic features
- Use plain English
- Variety of English
- Be balanced
- Be politically correct
- Be concise
- Minimize translators work
- Be coherent
- Be cohesive
- Be descriptive
- Dictionary (Best friend or worst enemy?)
- False friends, idioms and other idiomatic expressions
- Avoid slang, abbreviations, contractions ...
1.2 Procedures
- Test before write
- Examples
- External links
- Avoid branding and things that violate the license under which the manual is licensed
- Write first draft, revise, edit, improve, redo if necessary
- Chapters
- Markup
2.- General guidelines for translators
2.1 Linguistic features
- Comments
- TN Translator's Note
- Impersonal sentences (you)
- False friends
2.2 Procedures
- Markup
- Code blocks
- New lines
- Untranslatable strings
I hope it is useful and you accept it.
Best wishes.
--
chals
www.chalsattack.com
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