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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 11/11/2013 06:22 PM, Leslie S
Satenstein wrote:<br>
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<blockquote
cite="mid:1384219327.70370.YahooMailNeo@web163006.mail.bf1.yahoo.com"
type="cite">
<div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff;
font-family:HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial,
Lucida Grande, sans-serif;font-size:10pt"><font size="2"> Hi
Pete<br>
Your blog below was quite appropriate. I work in aerospace
and do a fair amount<br>
of writing and software development. The editing department
here is also a translation<br>
department as the company is a global one, dealing with
Chinese, Indian dialects, French, Spanish,<br>
and a slew of UN national languages. The translators want
paragraphs of text. The English editor wants<br>
text delivered double spaced 12 size font, with revision
management enabled and comments enabled. <br>
The company uses MS word, but Libreoffice, (for Fedora's
purpose), would suffice.<br>
<br>
By allowing authors to use Libreoffice, along with
Libreoffice's revision management, I believe that a quality<br>
product and a more easily and accurately translated source
would be generated.<br>
<br>
Regarding installations, and expositories, there are varying
levels of expertise as Fedora users. Many users,<br>
from my use of forums is that they are more frequented by are
beginners. They want a working Fedora distribution, <br>
so that they may use the tools that are included. (from
workbenches, to business software). I would say that the <br>
more experienced individuals do not frequent the forums too
often, as "they know it all, and what can they learn?"<br>
<br>
Your ideas are great, I fully agree with them, but "when the
only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".<br>
My view is that the tool you are using, with po files, is
great for application code messages. It misses something when<br>
used as the documentation preparation tool.<br>
<br>
Can you please try this experiment. Are you able to ask an
author to write his stuff with Libreoffice, and then turn on
revision managment to send out his work for comments and
feedback. Lets see how that works. I would even take a page or
two of text, if it is handed to me that way.<br>
<br>
Libreoffice is not a barrier, since is is ubiquitous. <br>
Regards<br>
<br>
Leslie </font><br>
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<br>
I don't know how to tell you any harder that Transifex is *NOT* an
automated machine translation service. It has the ability to use
external machine translation, but the Fedora Project does not use
this ability. There are real people reading these strings and
translating them into their native languages. If you want to
improve translations, you should contribute translations. The
localization workflow is not broken, and the tools are excellent.<br>
<br>
Emailing LibreOffice back and forth is certainly more efficient than
the mailing of physical paper that the workflow is modeled after. It
is *not* an improvement over an actual distributed version control
system. As I've said before, use whatever editor you like - as long
as the markup is correct and the files are saved in plain text.<br>
<br>
When I'm talking about "lowering participation barriers", I'm
thinking that most people with active FAS accounts know how to use
git, are familiar or can easily become familiar with
ReStructuredText or Markdown, and occasionally can take 15 minutes
to write up a post. I'm not talking about restructuring everyone's
workflow to suit your preference or enabling your criticism of
translations. Please don't turn this discussion into a monologue of
your storied past followed by insistence that we adopt a different
and labor-intensive workflow because you aren't willing to learn
what we already to. That topic has already been discussed enough.<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
-- Pete Travis
- Fedora Docs Project Leader
- 'randomuser' on freenode
- <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:immanetize@fedoraproject.org">immanetize@fedoraproject.org</a></pre>
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