From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Junio C Hamano Subject: Re: Translations [of Documentation] in Git release? Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2009 12:38:30 -0800 Message-ID: <7vskn54xbt.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org> References: <60646ee10901250941s34f7accem1b74fc201e895a41@mail.gmail.com> <200901261631.18157.jnareb@gmail.com> <60646ee10901261158w65b539dida26d2bd3bae6903@mail.gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: Jakub Narebski , Peter Krefting , Git Mailing List , yasuaki_n@mti.biglobe.ne.jp To: Dill X-From: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Mon Jan 26 21:57:26 2009 Return-path: Envelope-to: gcvg-git-2@gmane.org Received: from vger.kernel.org ([209.132.176.167]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1LRYWI-0001xY-9K for gcvg-git-2@gmane.org; Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:57:22 +0100 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752077AbZAZUz5 (ORCPT ); Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:55:57 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1752028AbZAZUz4 (ORCPT ); Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:55:56 -0500 Received: from a-sasl-quonix.sasl.smtp.pobox.com ([208.72.237.25]:50522 "EHLO sasl.smtp.pobox.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752019AbZAZUzz (ORCPT ); Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:55:55 -0500 Received: from localhost.localdomain (unknown [127.0.0.1]) by b-sasl-quonix.sasl.smtp.pobox.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id C47F11D420; Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:55:53 -0500 (EST) Received: from pobox.com (unknown [68.225.240.211]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by b-sasl-quonix.sasl.smtp.pobox.com (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 004FC1D5B5; Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:38:31 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: <60646ee10901261158w65b539dida26d2bd3bae6903@mail.gmail.com> (sarpulhu@gmail.com's message of "Mon, 26 Jan 2009 12:58:24 -0700") User-Agent: Gnus/5.110006 (No Gnus v0.6) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) X-Pobox-Relay-ID: B89175CA-EBEB-11DD-9E74-6E37113D384A-77302942!a-sasl-quonix.pobox.com Sender: git-owner@vger.kernel.org Precedence: bulk List-ID: X-Mailing-List: git@vger.kernel.org Archived-At: Dill writes: > On 1/26/09, Jakub Narebski wrote: >> On Mon, 26 Jan 2009, Peter Krefting wrote: >>> Jakub Narebski wrote: >>> >>> > With GUI translations we just use gettext conventions. I don't know >>> > any such convention for docs: >>> >>> There is a lot of documentation being translated using PO files. po4a - >>> http://po4a.alioth.debian.org/ - is a nice starting point for that. >> >> I'm not sure if XLIFF wouldn't be better format to use to translate >> _documents_. Gettext was meant to translate, I think, not very long >> messages in programs. >> >> Also I am not sure how much support this idea has. True, in last Git >> User's Survey[1] 63% to 76% wanted (parts of) Documentation... but that >> was out of 325 people who answered this question, with 3236 responses >> to survey in total, so numbers are more like 6% - 8%. >> >> [1] http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSurvey2008 >> [2] http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/ >> ... > I was thinking of handling it like the Linux kernel documentation...? By this, I understand you mean the model that lets the authors of the original English documentation be unaware of the presense of translations, and resulting translated files are placed in Documentation/??_??/ (where "??_??" are ja_JP, zh_CN, etc.) subdirectory. The approach obviously risks the translations to go stale very easily, but gives a nice separation of reponsibility and does not slow down the way the original documents are updated. I would actually prefer a directory structure "Documentation/translated/??_??/" so that people who are not involved in the translation do not have to see anything below _one_ directory (i.e. "translated"). If you step in as the Documentation translation coordinator to maintain such a tree structure that I can have as a submodule (or subtree merge) to git.git tree, you could talk me into updating my tree from time to time from your tree, but at that point we might actually want to have such a translation project as a separate and unrelated project. By the way, http://github.com/yasuaki/git-manual-jp.git/ has some Japanese translations (no, I am not involved in this any way, and I do not know about its current status). If you look at files in Documentation/ (not Documentation.ja) in that repository, you can see how they tried to make it easier to update the translation to match the original documentation set when the original gets updated. I do not know how well the approach works in practice, though.