[FM Discuss] translation of manuals and software interface localization

[Tomi Toivio]

2012/4/3 Janet Swisher <jmswisher at gmail.com>

> While I'm not part of a translation community, it seems to me that the
> answer is very much "it depends": on your goals for the manual, on the
> project's goals, on your level of involvement with the larger project,
> and on technical capability and commitment, to name a few. In some
> cases, completing the software localization must come before
> translating the manual. In other cases, there may be an urgent need
> for translating the manual, even if the project localization is
> incomplete.
>

In the beginning of the Finnish FM the first manual was a translation of
the Audacity manual, and then we tried to localize the Audacity interface,
which was maybe 50%-75% complete at that time. It turned out to be very
hard to get the .po file submitted and it took a really long time before it
was actually included in the software release etc. So the localization part
was dropped out of the project to get ahead with the translation of the
manuals. I started to think about this again since the localization issue
popped up again with Audacity 2.0, OpenStreetMap... etc.

Incomplete localization is making some of the manuals less readable. It
would be good to get a language site like Finnish more coordinated with the
localization projects. For an example Ubuntu in Launchpad is really active
and has a lot of contributors, but programs that are still using the old
method of downloading .po files seem to be a problem.

So localization is at the beginning of the manual process, but what about
the other end? There should be a category like "outdated" for manuals that
are several software releases behind. What to do with these? Add a flag or
a category like "outdated"? Make them available only in Booktype? Maybe
there is a need to arrange some collaborative manual update sessions, it
could be an event in some open source meeting... A collaborative update of
a manual wouldn't take a huge amount of time, and it would be a nice
introduction to FM/Booktype.

-- 
Best Regards
Tomi Toivio
Open Source Coordinator
http://fi.flossmanuals.net/
tomi at flossmanuals.net
+358453536625
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