Fostering the translations of live-manual
- To: Debian-live mailing list <debian-live@lists.debian.org>
- Subject: Fostering the translations of live-manual
- From: chals <chals@altorricon.com>
- Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 15:00:44 +0200
- Message-id: <CAJRhvAKXC_d1DSUwf-EsV+NPiXv3aw8+CWfh+DU1Mb=6BOHORA@mail.gmail.com>
Hi,
Well, the title "Fostering the translations of live-manual" should be understood as "Fostering the *completion* of the translations of live-manual". So far there are six languages under manual/po/ three of them are complete and maintained (es, fr and it) whereas three of them are not -yet- (de, pt_BR and ro). 50% is a good starting point to reach 100% someday soon. On the bright side as well, these languages are already activated in the autobuild so part of the initial work can be skipped and translators can focus on directly translating the po files.
I think it would be good to send three emails to debian-l10n-$LANGUAGE to tell them about these unfinished and unmaintained translations. From my own experience I have found that these groups are very responsive and helpful when approached (I'm talking about the French and Romanian teams through irc, thanks guys). But very likely some of the before mentioned localization teams do not even know about the existence of these untranslated files.
Which leads me to the second point of this mail: If the manual expects some new contributors to start working together I think it is time to change the workflow of the translators. So that people working on a language do not interfere with the work of some other people working in another language at the same time. I do not remember whose idea this was originally, very likely Ben's or Daniel's (Sorry for the attribution if this is not correct but the idea has been mentioned on irc on several occasions. I'd bet the idea belongs to either one or the other.)
This change in the workflow is only from a theoretical perspective, this is to say, adding it to the manual, because in practice we have been using a new workflow ever since this commit by Ben Armstrong:
This means that it has already been tested and it works. At least well enough to minimize as much as possible interferences among languages. Take this as an example of committing changes to *just* one language:
I do not think I should get into the details right now, among other things because to start with, as I said before this idea is not even mine. And secondly because this mail is to say that I can/will take charge of doing it if you see fit. (sending mails and adding the documentation to live-manual)
So far I have sent two personal mails. One to one of the contributors of the wiki [Language: pt_BR] (This sprang from an irc talk, again not an original idea of mine) and one to a personal friend of mine co-partner in a wiki I contribute to [Language: de + debian user + skilled with documentation.] So far I got no answer but I sent them last night.
And perhaps in this very mailing list there may be people that would like to contribute to complete the translations, so I leave several links of interest to those who might be interested:
(Again as a reminder, the languages that need loving and caring are German, Portuguese and Romanian but all the other languages welcome contributors and maintainers. Other new languages can be added as well.)
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