[FM Discuss] Forking an official manual for translation in FM?

[Tomi Toivio]

2012/4/16 adam <adam at flossmanuals.net>

>
> yeah, two general rules i rekin:
> 1. there is no such thing as too much documentation in the free software
> world so there is no need to ask permission but it is always good manners ;)
> 2. we are here to make free manuals about free software, not to build the
> fm empire so we should help where we see a need (ie. workbooks seem to be a
> good way we can compliment their efforts)


Seems like there are no Finnish-speaking people involved with the official
GIMP documentation based on the authors & contributors list. The situation
for a smaller language community is completely different, there are no
major open source software projects writing their official documentation in
Finnish. So in many cases it isn't really even about complementing the
official project, it is more about filling a void. The localization
community is quite active, but for some reason few people are interested in
translating the manuals. Probably it just seems easier to translate a lot
of short strings instead of a long book.

At least there is an active GIMP community writing tutorials in Finnish,
which makes it a lot easier to do some collaborative editing. Some mature
and popular open source programs don't have a local user community to turn
to when we look for contributors. This GIMP idea is a bit different from
what FM normally does, but there is a need to fill a huge gap in end user
documentation, and I just think that it is unlikely that somebody else
would do it. Photoshop apparently costs about 300 euros, but it is a little
bit hard to start using GIMP without a manual.

I don't say that Linux was written in Finnish, but it was written in
Finland. I have a theory about why documentation comes so far behind. Eric
S. Raymond has defined a hacker as somebody who has learned functional
English, and the Finnish open source community is really like a big fan
club of ESR. Eric S. Raymond published his extremely influential essay How
to Become a Hacker(*) in 2001, which was before Linux was seen as
user-friendly. By the time Ubuntu was released in 2004, all Finnish open
source people had learned functional English. All of the people who would
actually be able and willing to write open source documentation were
writing it in functional English.

(*) http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

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