Re: [RFD] Documentation/HOWTO translated into Japanese

Greg KH
2007-06-10T16:20:20Z

On Sun, Jun 10, 2007 at 02:24:51PM +0200, Jesper Juhl wrote:
> On 10/06/07, Tsugikazu Shibata <tshibata@ab.jp.nec.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I am posting Documentation/HOWTO which is translated into Japanese at
> > bottom of this email.

Great, thanks for posting this and doing the work.

> > This document had been reviewed by JF project which has long history
> > to translate documents into Japanese. (not only kernel but also FAQs).
> > For JF, please see : http://www.linux.or.jp/JF/index.html
> > Please also note that the page is written in Japanese, but you can see
> > a lot of results there.
> >
> > Actually, this is my first trial to post Japanese translated document
> > and here are some points I decided ;
> >
> > - Character encoding is ISO-2022-JP, which is normally used for email
> > using Japanese.
>
> I think there's consensus that documents in the kernel source should
> be either plain ASCII or UTF-8 (doesn't UTF-8 work for japanese?).

Is it hard to convert it to UTF-8?

> > - Added "Singed-off-by" line
> > - Left the JF header strings which include translator/reviewer's name
> > - Non-patch format, simple text
> >
> > I would be happy if I could get your comments and suggestions.
> > Though I know there are several issues to merge it, I want to have
> > discussions with you to accomplish it.
> >
> > This email comes from strong recommendation from Greg K-H when he came
> > to Tokyo two weeks ago. Thanks >Greg
> >
> > ----- Below lines are Japanese Translation of "HOWTO" -----
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Tsugikazu Shibata <tshibata@ab.jp.nec.com>
> > ---
>
> Unfortunately I don't speak japanese so I can't say anything about the
> translation at all, but I do have some other comments/questions.
>
> If we start adding translated versions of documentation to the kernel
> source how should we organize the documents? Should each language get
> a sepperate directory in Documentation/ - like Documentation/JP/,
> Documentation/EN/, Documentation/DA/ etc?
>
> With multiple translated versions of the documentation in the tree,
> don't we run the risk that the translations will quickly become
> outdated since most people updating the documentation won't be able to
> update the translations?

That's up to the people maintaining the translations to do.

> Since the common language of most kernel contributors is english I
> personally feel that we should stick to just that one language in the
> tree and then perhaps keep translations on a website somewhere. So the
> authoritative docs stay in the tree, in english, so that as many
> contributors as possible can read and update them. It would then be a
> seperate project to generate translations and keep them updated
> according to what's in the tree. Perhaps we could get the kernel.org
> people to create an official space for that and then place a pointer
> to that site in Documentation/ somewhere.

No, I think the translated files should be in the tree proper, we have
the space :)

thanks,

greg k-h