Documentation/translations: Italian

[Federico Vaga <federico.vaga@vaga.pv.it>]

Hello,

I'm writing you because I would like to start an effort to translate the 
Documentation in Italian. I would like also to express the idea of providing 
guide lines for translations.

A looked a bit in the archive but I did not find anything about these two 
topics (Italian translation, guide lines for translations).

I know that there are already translations for Asian languages but I am not 
able to find the history of them. I do not know if translations in European 
languages are going to be accepted (perhaps there is the assumption that 
everyone knows English in the European continent and it is a waste of energy 
to do translations[?]). For example, even if French and Germans are quite 
active there are not translations yet in their language: is there a particular 
reason or simply nobody did it?

Why
===
There is nothing better for understanding than our own mother tongue, and 
reading Documentation is one of those activities where it is important to 
understand its message rather than learning a different language (there are 
dedicated books and courses for that). This is especially true for young 
developers and new-comers who are really focused on understanding Linux and a 
different language can be an obstacle sometimes. I personally had a couple of 
experiences where I pointed people to the documentation and I had to explain 
English rather than Linux. Very competent people but they were not used to use 
English every day.

I put myself in this list of people who prefer the mother tongue language when 
it is time to really understand something. I work for an international 
organization in a country that is not mine with people coming from all around 
the European continent and our common tongue is bad-English with all its 
dialects and accents: true-English (with its own dialects), spaghetti-English, 
kartoffel-English, paella-English, formage-English and more. Misunderstanding 
is not rare, and sometimes express ourselves takes more time than needed. This 
is another reason why I believe that for understanding purposes is good to 
read in our own mother tongue.

Plan
====
If you agree with the need to support different translations, I would like to 
do the Italian one. But first I would like to open a little discussion about 
translations  "how to write translations"; this discussion should produce a 
document (in English) with guide lines for translator (e.g. Documentation/
translation/howto.rst): what to translate first, what to NOT translate, how to 
structure it.
Once this is defined I will start the Italian translation (I already have some 
documents translated).

How to do translations (IMHO)
-----------------------------
Here my personal guide lines for translations

- Translate only sphinx-ready documents, do not translate documents which are 
not yet sphinx. We should avoid useless double work; at some point, I guess, 
everything will be sphinx.
- Include in all documents a disclaimer saying that English is the main 
reference (use sphinx directive 'include' to include it).
- Include in all documents a reference to the English version. So it will be 
easy jump to the original document.
- Translate in order: non-technical documents (they are stable, useful for a 
wider group of people (developers and managers): process/, doc-guide/ ), 
technical documents about key concepts (they are stable, and important for 
new-comers), subsystems (the big picture is stable, typically they do not 
describe all little details that may change), and then other documents
- avoid scattered translations: try to finish one "topic" before translating 
something else

Probably there is much more, that's why I would like to have a little 
discussion about it.


Thanks for reading everything :)

-- 
Federico Vaga
http://www.federicovaga.it/


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