On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 01:25:03AM +0900, Jean-Christophe
Helary wrote:
> (Ooops, sent off list by mistake)
>
> On 4 nov. 07, at 17:33, David Lawyer wrote:
>
> >On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 09:54:15AM -0600, Ian Hakes
wrote:
> >>I think this is a good idea. Having access to a
larger pool of
> >>volunteers
> >>might help with tasks like translation, Docbook
encoding, etc, so
> >>that LDP
> >>can reach a larger audience, and is more
accessible to general
> >>technical
> >>writers.
> >
> >Translation is done by people in non-English
> >speaking countries so this is not a high priority
task either.
>
> Translators are English speaking (obviously) and a lot
of them
> register as volunteers for translation tasks on
English-only sites, if
> needs are made explicit.
I don't recall every noticing anyone on the English discuss
list in
the US, Canada, UK or Australia who volunteer to translate
LDP doc
into foreign languages. Sure, there were some translators
but they
worked under the auspices of non-English Linux documentation
projects
in non-English speaking countries.
> It seems to me that translating the already existing
corpus into a
> number of languages could be set as a priority
Not at all, since most are outdated and not worthwhile
translating.
> especially if one considers that such volunteers are
sometimes
> experts in their field and can also contribute to
authoring in
> English (which can later be proof-read and edited for
official
> publication).
Please don't misunderstand me. Translation of the
relatively few
good and up-to-date LDP documents is a high priority. But
translation
hasn't been handled on this list. Perhaps it should be.
But without
a good selection of up-to-date documentation there will
hardly be
anything worthwhile to translate. So trying to get people
to author,
revise, review and administer for tldp.en is a higher
priority task
for this mailing list. Of course people are free to
volunteer for
whatever they want to do and I would strongly encourage
anyone who
wants to translate docs to do so. Even more important would
be to
In the past I've looked over translation sites in Russian
and Spanish
(the 2 languages I've studied) and found that there are lots
of
problems: stale translations, new docs not translated, etc.
It would
be nice if we could help them but how? I think a first
priority is to
put our own house in order and generate a lot of significant
new docs
to translate.
There is a i18n mailing list at LDP but no posts for the
past 2 1/2
years. Even then, most posts were just testing or asking if
anyone
was still on the list. Once LDP gets it's docs sorted out
and has a
content management system that includes either translations
or links
to them, this will help translations.
A final note the that recruiting using volunteer match will
recruit
mainly in the US so that most volunteers will have English
as their
native language and not be suitable as translators. To
translate into
a language, you should have that language as your native
language (or
the equivalent --some know 2 languages about equally well).
David Lawyer
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