Re: Spanish translation of the WWW pages
> Hi Jaey, I have some questions regarding the translation of the
> WWW pages:
>
I have added debian-www to the reply as others may have similar questions.
> 1.- the .wmlrc contains a variable -D CUR_ISO_LANG Should this
> be changed to es ? The HOWTO says nothing on this.
Yes you should change it. It is not currently used, but will be. This is
related to question 2.
> 2.- is it necessary to change all headers of the wml files
> which currently have
> #!wml -o ../../debian.org/%BASE.html.en
> to
> #!wml -o ../../debian.org/%BASE.html.es
> or is this handled by the Makefile?
Currently you need to change the extension on the filenames. This is
because wml doesn't allow variable expansion on shebang lines. The upstream
maintainer said it will be allowed in the next version. Fixing this will
remove one more language specific piece of information. :)
> 3.- I would need to add this to the Makefile in the spanish dir,
> is this ok?:
> # Recode is needed in case there are accents (latin1) in the
> # translation, turn _ to á
> recode:
> ( recode latin1:html -d $(WMLFILES) )
>
> all: recode $(HTMLFILES)
You may do what you want with the Makefiles. I believe it will be easier
in the long run if you avoid making modifications to the Makefiles.
In fact, I encourage people to make softlinks to the english version so
any changes I make will be seen automatically (Makefiles are very picky
and changes sometimes have odd side-effects so it can take a few tries
before 'improvements' work).
To address your problem, wouldn't it be better if the conversion was done
before you add the file to CVS or use the facility in wml for handling
this? Read the section on Pass 6 of 'man wml_intro' to see if this
will be easy to use.
Another solution would be to add it to all the Makefiles as many of
the translations could use something like that. I'm open to suggestions
on this as the users of 8 bit characters have a lot more experience with
this than I do.
> 4.- The HOWTO says that the text should be kept as similar as
> possible to the original files, but on the related_links page
> a link could be made to the LUCAS project (Linux Documentation
> Project in Spanish): http://www.infor.es/LuCAS/, as well to
> spanish groups. Is this ok?
This is exactly why I phrased the statement the way I did. I encourage people
to add links to equivalent information in their own language. Please leave
the original link to the English doc though.
> 5.- I have translated the manoj's social contract. But it seems
> to be an SGML file, automatically made into HTML. Should I ask
> manoj for the original file and translate it to? Is this file
> automatically modified? (I think not... but I have doubts)
Don't worry about it in this case - just translate the social contract.
In general though, people may want to have access to documentation in
other formats. This is the function of SGML. We need to improve the
accessibility of the SGML source to Debian documentation and improve the
structure so translations can easily be added. This will go a lot faster
if some people not only push to make it happen, but help with the organization.
You know how english-centric us native english speakers are. :)
On a related note, I'm sure internationalization of the install programs would
be extremely popular. If any of you have experience with this you should
try to help out.
> Umm.. this is all for now, if I have more questions I'll get in
> touch with you. I hope I can have all volunteers return most of the
> translated pages by this week, and I have translated all the files in
> the root dir as well as the template in my spare time, so I would like
> to do the first spanish upload, maybe, by the end of this week.
>
Great :)
Jay Treacy
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