[Fedora-trans-list] Re: new mailing lists for translators

[Martin Mewes]

Hi Sarah,

finally subsciption to the list needed to be nodded by the Moderator. 
Uhh, this list seems to be very secure :-)

Am Donnerstag, 11. Dezember 2003 02:53 schrieb Sarah Wang:

> > I recently signed up as a translator, but I do not get any info
> > somewhere on how to start or what needs to be translated or
> > anything else like this.
>
> I totally agree with you about the lack of instructions/procedures
> in regard to translation. The main webpage for Fedora Translation
> Project (http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/translations/) is quite
> bare.  I'm working with the webpage maintainer to try to get more
> info on the website at the moment. Please bear with me :)

The question is. How can we help you out of this situation?
Is there anything in order what we (or at least I) could do?

> > Translators are redirected to fedora-devel-list or
> > fedora-docs-list which I signed up both.
>
> Well, in the future, we are going to use fedora-trans-list mainly
> to post any instructions, information and discussions.

Yes, I want to translate and not to documentate stuff.
Contents of HOWTOs and Documentation should not be part of this list, 
but technical advisories on what techniques should be used.

As Webmin/Usermin-WTCO I know what you are talking about.
The question is/was always regarding the use of which HTML-Entities 
should be used based on HTML 3.2 or HTML 4.0 or use of ä or 
better &#ddd; stuff and so forth.

The only goal was trying to speed up the process of translating the 
software with user contributed shell- or perl-scripts, how to package 
translation files and finally upload them to the upstream (/me) who 
after QA was done forwared all data once a week to the maintainer of 
the complete software himself.

It resulted now in a weekly FAQ as there is no room for discussion 
anymore, because problems seem to be solved if no other "weired" 
languages like /kisuaheli/ ;-)

> > All I found was:
> >
> > http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/documentation-guide/
> >
> > but does this belong to translators to or just to writers of
> > documentation?
>
> That's for the writers of documentation. However, we still can
> translate it if the community feel it's valuable. Right now, we are
> trying to set up seperate CVS repository to store documenatation
> translations.

To get more folks in here it needs to be more publizised (correct 
spelling?). And to get more as well, the Main-WebPage needs to be 
available in different languages as well as a start point.
I am ready to help thing put to german if needed.

On the other hand I see that if some cannot read/understand the 
english original, how can he/she be able to translate things from 
english to ... :-)

[What is po?]
> "po" file is normally generated by GNU gettext tool. It contains
> original msg and translated msg pairs. It's used very commonly for
> software interfaces. You will noticed that all software
> translations are in po file format.
>
> The advantage of po format is its maintainability. It can be easily
> updated and merged using the existing gettext tools.

So how about a FAQ on HOWTO work with po ( at least for folks like me) 
as a start :-)

Freundliche Grüsse
Kind regards

Martin Mewes
-- 
Official Webmin/Usermin Translation Co-Ordinator
http://www.webmin.com/
http://webmin.mamemu.de/ (Mirror)