Translations

[Richard Hainsworth]

Translations take time and are almost by definition out of sync with the 
latest version of the file being translated.

It would be useful for a non-English reader of a translation to know at 
what point the translation was made. Even with an old translation and an 
understanding of the changes between the old and new texts (eg. using 
DIFF), a non-English user can work out what the new text means.

Suggestion: All English README's should have an extension with data 
information, and a link file with the simple name, in the same way 
dynamic libraries are named. eg.,

README.20100401 (major revision as of 1 April 2010)
README (link to README.20100401)

The translated file could then be (eg)

translations/ru/README.20100401
translations/po/README.20090313

To avoid too many README's, a minor update to include typos would not 
need a new date, but major revisions, such as new paragraphs, changes in 
link addresses, would need to bump the date/version number

A very visible date stamp will also indicate how old a README is, 
indicating that its content should be reviewed if it has become very old.

Regards,
Richard

On 12/16/2010 09:32 PM, Andrew Whitworth wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 1:28 PM, Patrick R. Michaud<pmichaud at pobox.com>  wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 10:10:53AM -0500, Andrew Whitworth wrote:
>>> I would like to create a folder docs/translations/ to hold
>>> translations. That way we don't fill up the root and other important
>>> directories with a million translations of things. So we would have a
>>> folder structure like this:
>>>
>>> docs/translations/fr/
>>> docs/translations/ru/
>>> docs/translations/pt/
>>> docs/translations/pt-BR/
>> Would it perhaps be better to maintain documentation translations
>> in a separate repository (or multiple repositories) altogether?
>> That way commit bits could be given out much more freely for
>> people doing translation -- i.e., we wouldn't need a CLA before
>> handing out a commit bit to new translators.
>>
>> Just a thought.
>>
>> Another thought:  Start it off as a separate repository for now,
>> and bring it into the main repository when we know better how we'd
>> like it to be structured.
> I like that too. It reminds me very much of the huge translation
> project for MediaWiki. They have a separate website entirely,
> http://translatewiki.net/, which works on providing translations for
> MediaWiki and it's extensions (and now other open source projects as
> well). Actually, now that I think about it, maybe we could register
> our separate translation project with TranslateWiki if we were serious
> about it and if we had i18n support.
>
> Anyway, I like this idea. I think we do want translations and should
> want them, but we don't want that work to interfere with the code work
> that we do in the main repo.
>
> --Andrew Whitworth
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