Sebastien Arbogast wrote:
Mark's initiative is fully coherent with our motivation at Planet
Cocoon : making Cocoon documentation closer to its users (and once
again, its users are not only its developers).
We are trying to make a documentation platform which is simpler to use
and write for. And now with this new i18n module we just opened the
door to people who understand English enough to read, but not to
write.
Sort of. Most of these translators do a poor job at creating
understandable translations. Furthermore, as was pointed out in another
post, 99% of the documentation for the things Cocoon depends on is in
English. So what's the point? However, you can do whatever you want at
PlanetCocoon in this regard. Just don't expect the official docs to be
in anything but English.
The way I see it, we will mostly use that as another input, another
potential source of documentation but we have to setup a converter on
that input, translators to keep the documentation coherent and prevent
the above mentioned maintenance problems. Of course I agree our
priority is to get a good core English documentation. But it appears
obvious to me that it's far easier to translate an existing
documentation than to create one from scratch in a language that is
not natural to you. It's just a matter of... separation of concerns :
the author has the ideas, the translator has the language, reviewers
have the knowledge to verify, etc.
Finally the greatest advantage of this internationalization thing is
that we will be able to eventually setup forums in other languages,
which should help spread Cocoon community and get this tool closer to
the user (always the same motivation). How did you guys react when the
French mailing list was setup ? Let me just translate a small part of
Sylvain's introduction in Cocoon French area...
And serious reservations were expressed during that discussion about
fragmenting the Cocoon community. Each list or forum needs to have
committers actively participate. Furthermore, the same questions would
tend to get asked on each list and searching for answers in the archives
becomes a problem. The French list was allowed to be created to see how
it goes and because Sylvain offered to take responsibility for it.
Ralph
