[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: BoF meeting at aKademy
From:       Philip Rodrigues <philip.rodrigues () chch ! ox ! ac ! uk>
Date:       2006-09-30 14:53:31
Message-ID: efm0bl$cir$1 () sea ! gmane ! org
[Download RAW message or body]

Hi,

Firstly, thanks for the summary, Jens.
 
> We had a long discussion about the translation of documentation. It is
> already difficult to find people who can translate but having them to deal
> with docbook seems to be an additional burden for some. There was the
> suggestion to move to a wiki for documentation but there where also many
> arguments why this would be not a good idea.
> Basicly this is an open point for the future and there was no decision
> made.

Would anyone who was at the BoF (or any other translators) like to expand on
this point? I'm interested in feedback from translators about any aspect of
the documentation (and I'm sure the rest of the docs team are interested
too!). Especially since now is a good time to discuss this: we have time to
decide on the direction of the documentation for KDE 4, and translator
input is important for this.

> During this discussion we learned that in some countries documentation is
> written in the local language but not in English. That means we have
> documentation which was never re-translated to English and therefore is
> useless for the rest of the world.

This is definitely an unfortunate situation. Did anyone at the BoF have
ideas about how to solve this problem, or some reasons why the problem
exists?

> There was a wish to be able to generate documentation of partly translated
> documents. The idea was that a document where just one paragraph is still
> in English is already usefull for the users.

This sounds very reasonable. Is there someone working on the translation
tools for KDE 4? I can think of at least one other thing that would benefit
both the documentation team and translators, which is:

Have a way to mark an SVN commit as "this changes strings, but only corrects
English grammatical errors, so automatically mark all fuzzies created by
this commit as done."

Does anyone have an idea how easy/hard this would be to implement with the
KDE 4 translation system?

> There was also a wish from the HCI working group to improve the
> cooperation between the translators and the working group for issues that
> are important for both sides. There was no immediate respond to this wish.

I can't speak officially for the HCI team, but I think all you need to do to
help is subscribe to kde-hci@kde.org (it's quite low traffic) and mention
any issues that affect translators.

> To sum up the meeting I would say it was nice to meet the people from all
> over the world. All of us there have issues in the translation process but
> none of the issues triggered immediate actions and no decisions where
> made.

Glad to hear that there's a good community developing around
translation :-).

Regards,
Philip
-- 
KDE Documentation Team: http://i18n.kde.org/doc
KDE Documentation Online: http://docs.kde.org

[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]