Hi Alex,
Well there's a discussion ongoing in the French NLC doc project, because as you can imagine, following a schema that you have outlined here would require us to change a lot. Unfortunately, there appears to be no general consensus as yet.One of the fears is that a French lambda user, who couldn't care less about docs in other languages, would find themselves faced with lots of links leading nowhere, or to a document in English only, and thus would lose interest in the doc site as a valuable source of information. While I don't share this fear, I can understand it. I imagine that it could be very frustrating indeed. Another point made was that such a schema would automatically make all our docs redundant overnight, since we would be forced to rewrite everything to conform to a given baseline documentation, no doubt written in English. I tend to disagree here too. I think that the whole point of setting up a system like the wiki for the doc project is to allow for creativity from the various language groups to become visible in a single place, thereby furthering exchanges with other groups and stimulating people to translate the work of others. It recognizes that each language culture has its specificities, including the way in which computer software is used. For example, in Europe, we have different constraints for billing and invoicing (European Directives) than those used in the US (and no doubt elsewhere). This means that any documentation about say, the report generator, or Base module, that expounds on a billing system, would have to be adapted to suit each country's or region's own requirements. The French NLC doc project has created some general user documentation, of course, but some of it also reflects the way French people think in general, or are taught to think in school ("cartesian" thinking). This tends to display itself more in the way the documentation is written, than in actual content. I remember one of my former French bosses telling me that he couldn't understand how my thought processes worked because I wasn't "cartesian" enough, yet I came to much the same conclusions in my writings as he did :-) It also makes for a bit of a nightmare when you have to translate things from French to English, and I've been doing this now for nearly 20 years !!!
The idea is that the wiki approach allows for exactly that. The FR community can decide how to localize the start page, for example, and if and how to localize any given English documentation. Since it's topic-based (not paragraph-based, like the current help localization framework) it would allow for any freedom to actually localize a topic into language *and* cultural context. There could be as many French pages that have no English counterparts or vice versa. As long as a user stays in one language track and the localizer of a page makes sure that all links in a page are valid (and not just translates the text including links to English docs) she would not stumble over untranslated documents. You would just notice that there is no English (oer Italian or German) page to a given French page and then, as a localizer, decide if it's worth to have one. Frank -- Frank Peters Documentation Project Co-Lead The OOo Documentation Project: SIGN UP - PARTICIPATE - CONTRIBUTE IT'S FREE! NO OBLIGATIONS! http://documentation.openoffice.org http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
