ANALYSIS One of the key reasons that the transitioning of the "translated" pages was abandoned two years ago was that even then the amount of translations was very patchy. So, I spent some time today analysing the state of translations on the SF/FAQ - the results are in the attached spreadsheet. Note carefully that this is a numerical analysis only, I cannot vouch for the accuracy or otherwise of any of the translations, or if they conform to current Audacity behavior. You will see that we have only four complete translations: Spanish, French, Dutch and Turkish - and the Italian complete bar one page. The rest look reasonably impressive when you look at their FAQ index pages, but most of the translations in the links there, link out to untranslated pages (a substantial number of them and it is mainly the simple short pages that have been translated). RECOMMENDATION On the basis of this I believe that the right thing to do is to implement what I suggested yesterday which is basically to deprecate these SF/FAQs along with their translations by moving them off the SF/FAQ page onto a new page of their own but linked to from SF/FAQ page. We already have a French translation of the manual FAQs down to good efforts by their translators ( Bravo ! ) It would possibly be worth moving over the Spanish, Dutch, Turkish and Italian translations - but I believe that this would best be done by a fluent speaker of those languages so that accuracy and veracity can be checked. However, personally, I would prefer the translators to start afresh with the current FAQ content in the manual as we discussed with James earlier (and as the French did), as this way they will be working with up to date 2.0 material. I do not believe there is much value to be gained from moving over any of the partially translated language sections. In that state they do not do us credit and I do not believe they bestow multi-lingual credibility on the project. Thanks, Peter.
Peter Sampson Tel: +44 (0)1625 524 780 Mob: +44 (0)7732 278 299 ________________________________ From: Gale Andrews <[email protected]> To: audacity-quality <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Sent: Monday, March 12, 2012 6:30 PM Subject: Re: [Audacity-devel] [Audacity-quality] website update mockup & 2.0 release | From Peter Sampson <[email protected]> | Mon, 12 Mar 2012 04:57:26 -0700 (PDT) | Subject: [Audacity-devel] [Audacity-quality] website update mockup & 2.0 release > Gale wrote: > >And given it's not committed yet, this was my attempt at handling > >the FAQ: > >http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq-g.php . > > > >All the "older" FAQ links which have been retained go to the same > >pages as now, though I've modified a few pages (which won't > >display until help/faq.php is committed/pushed). > > > >So another question. For when all the FAQ's are translated in the > >Manual, do we want a "legacy FAQ" (probably all the currently > >committed content, not my reduced list) for benefit of legacy Mac > >and Linux? Is it worth it for limited usership? > > > MANAGEMENT SUMMARY: > > My recommendation would be to prune the "Older Frequently > Asked Questions" entirely from the main SF/FAQ page and > instead park them on a new page of their own on the SF site > with a link to there from the main SF/FAQ page. Summary answer. Maybe OK, but please provide appropriate text for the new page after reading the below. > Over time they can be dreprecated and eventually deleted. > > If the FAQ page ends up too sparse looking (but I don't think > it will) we could consider incorporating it in the the SF > "Documentation Page" > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > REASONING: > > > 1) I though we'd agreed a while back in discussion with James > that when 2.0 was released that we would be trimming back the > FAQs in on the SF site to just those that were actually > "About Audacity" i.e. the very first section on the SF FAQ page > (or even trimming the lot) and that for the funtional/operational > issues FAQs we would provide a link to the FAQ section in the > manual (as you have in the blue box). I don't think we had agreed that. I followed what I proposed a few weeks ago, Vaughan +1'ed it, and no-one else commented. > 2) I thought we had also agreed that many or most of the SF > FAQ translations were pretty out of date anyway and that it was > thus not worth the editorial effort of moving said translations to > the manual. We agreed IIRC that we would rely on the translators > working on the material that is now in the manual's FAQ section. As you can see from the FAQ's retained on faq-g, a surprising number of FAQ's are still more or less acceptable for 2.0. I had suggested moving the existing translations of the FAQ's to the Manual about two years ago, which you started then abandoned. James agreed with you that the moving is quite a lot of work, which I pretty much acceded to since I don't have the time to do it if no-one else wants to help with it. Although moving was a moderate amount of work, it would have been better IMO for the non-English/French user than the messy SF FAQ page we have now. The text could have just been on a single page in the Manual, without links, copied direct in one block from the .po file. It would not have impacted the Manual translators. When they were ready to translate, they would have translated the current content in the Manual, and moved that over the translation of the old content. Historical now, anyway. > 3) It does not make sense to maintain two parallel (and non- > identical) sets of FAQs covering the same ground in the manual > and on the SF site. This is redundant duplication and makes for > more editorial work. Avoiding duplication and redundancy is a > general guiding principle that we work to on the documentation > team. We are not going to maintain two sets of FAQ's. I suspect that only about a half or less of the languages have a near complete translation of the old FAQ. Once the Manual FAQ's are translated for those languages, we can remove all the "older FAQ's" on faq-g. > 4) Are the SF FAQs fully up to date for 2.0 functionality? > > (You state on your mock-up page that thay are "largely valid > for 2.0" - but this is not really good enough.) Making them "good enough" is the purpose of translating the current FAQ's in the Manual. I can't and won't modify the content of the old FAQ's to any degree: (1) that really would be duplication (2) doing so would break the translations of the older FAQ's so defeat the purpose. > If not then that is a further reason to prune them from the SF > site with the release of 2.0 Please consider the needs of those who do not speak English. This is a multi-lingual project. > I can see the argument for possibly retaining some legacy > FAQs somewhere for those users who choose to stick with 1.2 > but not on the main SF/FAQ page. > > 5) Retaining the SF/FAQs on the page under "Older Frequently > Asked Questions" will only encourage some folk to read the > somewhat outdated FAQs on the SF site rather than linking > out to the more up to date ones that we have in the manual. > A sub-optimal scenario. Given you did not want to move the translations of the older FAQ's into the Manual, those old links are needed so as not to throw out at least some help for those in other languages. I can see the slight danger of English/French people reading the older FAQ's. So we "could" move all the links on faq-g for individual older FAQ's to another page. The reason I didn't do it is that page would not (yet) be a "legacy_faq" page. It would be a page of FAQ's for languages other than French/English where the content is still more or less acceptable for 2.0, so better than no content at all. For people using 1.2, valid content would be missing. If you can see a reasonable non-confusing way of presenting the moved links on a separate page, I'd be prepared to move the older links. I don't think the resultant FAQ-g would be too short. When a Manual FAQ gets translated, its link would be added to FAQ-g. > FOOTNOTE: > Your first sentence on the mockup page where it says: > "If your question isn't answered here ..." is not really > appropriate - as we are not expecting the reader to read > FAQs "here" but rather to link to the online manual or > their installed Help. > > I would say something like: > "Fuller information can be be obtained from the documentation, > or you can contact us. Again, readers will be viewing this in other than English. I would agree with you if English was the only consideration, but what you suggest would just be a link to non-existent documentation for most other languages. > And I would recommend placing that under the blue box rather > than above it. - leaving the introductory text to just say: > "These are some of the most common questions about Audacity" -1, while the page has to consider languages other than English. Thanks, Gale ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Try before you buy = See our experts in action! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-dev2 _______________________________________________ audacity-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/audacity-devel
120313 Analysis of SourceForge FAQ Translations.xls
Description: MS-Excel spreadsheet
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