Hi @all
G. Roderick Singleton wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-09-29 at 17:00 +0200, Jean-Francois Nifenecker wrote:
>> Frank Peters a écrit :
>>> It would be good to have some sufficiently bilingual community
>>> members to help with getting non-English content into English
>>> (if we want to see English as "root language").
>> I'll join Alex' choir here: the number of "language-aware" authors
is very little. Adding the time availability criterion would shrink the
number to a handful, to the best.
>> Second, being able to express oneself on fora doesn't mean that the
translations produced are of sufficient quality. A deep review of the
translations is then due.
>
> I agree.
me too!
>
>> Also, don't forget that translating some doc into another language
implies providing screenshots in the same language. This means that the
translation effort is quite similar to writing a doc from scratch.
Having done that once for the OOo project ("Calc to base" how-to), I can
tell you it's a lot of work that many would find redundant hence
non-motivating.
I can tell You that a "translation" of a document is more difficult than
create a new one. And thats exactly the point. We had a lot of people
who are (at the first time) interested in documentation works. If we
tell them "please lets start reviewing existing documents in order to
get this stuff to a higher quality" or "we had a lot of good English or
French documents needing translations" a lot of them disappear or said
"All what I want to do is write my experiences with OpenOffice.org to a
HowTo to share it with other people". Only a very little count of
persons is willing to do translations and they are still involved in
many other projects (online help, website, oooauthors and so one) :-(
>
> Again I agree. However, I think that even an announcement of new works
> would be a good thing. For example, Sophie's announcement or the ref
> cards as a work in progress has raised some interest for something
> similar in English. We, at the doc project, also have works in progress.
> The important one, a complete rewrite of the VBA to OOo cross-reference,
> is not yet ready for its first editorial review, let alone letting
> others look. :-( But here you have something that might be of interest
> since it will be somewhat technical and likely an easy target for
> translation or rewrite.
> As to Calc to Base, this will be covered in Chapter 7 of the User Guide
> along with all the other stuff one hopefully needs. Unfortunately, the
> Guide lives in a issue and started as a sole project so it is awkward to
> manage.
>>> I see what you mean. I know that I am stretching it now but should
>>> we have documentation guidelines available for other projects that
would
>>> help us to leverage existing docs created in other projects?
>> Yes, I second that.
>
> Me too. I had hoped when we started the Setup Guide project for 2.0 that
> it would be included in the distribution like the 1.1.x guide.
> However ...
I had this hope too. But the reality is that we will not get the setup
guide to the install sets as binary documents because the main argument
is that we should use the same (string based) system as the help system.
I had tried to show the difference between complex documents and short
help phrases but this has no effect...
One important fact is that we have a lot of work to do and only a few
persons to do the job!
For example I try to add some new stuff to the setupguide but I could
not clone myself (sometimes I believe some others like Ger or Sophie
have found I way to do this because it seems they don't sleep on works
all around the clock for OOo) and every time a open the document and
start writing a new actual problem appear or a new release to QA.
Don't know what a solution could be. But I think we will find one.
Regards
Marko
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