Yves, "We have to think about hosting pages, but also all the translation process: who is doing what, when do we need what modify, who change what, etc."
I believe there are really two (2) areas in which OSGeo projects can focus on translation: (1) Easing the translation of the GUI of FOSS GIS projects. (3) Writing program documentation in a way that makes translation as easy as possible. (2) Understanding how internationalization can impact non-GUI design decisions. The first list item above is the most obvious. How many OSGeo projects currently support internationalization? I know that OpenJUMP does, and that this involves a serious investment in programmer time and energy. But I think the end result is worth the effort. I oftentimes wonder if internationalization is one of the reasons why JUMP foundered and OpenJUMP blossomed... The second list item has a lot to do with document design and layout. I've found, for example, that separating graphics from text can make translation a lot easier, at least for documents that are not laid out dynamically, like PDF and many word processor documents. The third list item is much less obvious, and sometimes I don't even recognize that I might be dealing with a translation issue until I make a concerted effort to think like a non-English speaker. For example: OpenJUMP Feature Schemas reference simple feature attributes by attribute name or a numerical index. I wanted a way to test if a feature schema contained a set of attributes that met a group of minimum requirements. I realized that I shouldn't use attribute names for this test, but the numerical position and/or data type of the attribute instead. This is because an attribute with a name of "point description" in English is going to have a totally different name in German, though the attribute will serve the same logical purpose. What I should really be doing in the feature schema test is looking for at least one String attribute in the last position of the schema. Maybe we need a short guide on providing internationalization support for open source GIS programs? The Sunburned Surveyor -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Yves Jacolin Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2008 7:00 AM To: Discussions, OSGeo Subject: [OSGeo-Discuss] Manage translation in OSGeo project Hi, ** History ** 2 years ago I began to translate the GDAL-OGR documentation into french. In order to do things correctly I contacted FrankW to know which way was the best to do things. As I began to work on a OOo document, we decided that I will send the dox files for gdal and ogr utilities. The other pages are now hosted by my personal website (which aims to host all my documentation). ** Currently ** Now it is finished, and after contacting some other projet, I saw that some project did not think about translation process and hosting. QGIS host its documentation in LaTeX files in SVN which is a quiet good solution but with some constrainte (not all people know LaTeX tags and a lot are afraid about editing LaTeX files). Some other are using Trac wiki which seems quiete limited (but I am not aware of all its possibility). In the past (not so far) I tried to run the Cartoweb Community [1] using Dokuwiki and some hack to manage langage process, but this is not good enough. ** Some propositions ** Well, I have no one, but as I am mainly a translator and began writing some other documentation, I think this is time to think about this (for my personnal point of view ;) ). I think this is important that all documentation should be in the same website as the original, see Dokuwiki website [2] for a good example (to me). We have to think about hosting pages, but also all the translation process: who is doing what, when do we need what modify, who change what, etc. ** Conclusion ** The purposes of this mail are : * tell to everybody (project committee, dev) to not to forget to think about translation * run a discuss about this small "issue". Best regards, Y. [1] http://ww.cartoweb-community.net [2] http://www.deezer.com/track/848 -- Yves Jacolin ------------- "Donner la liberté aux individus ne suffit pas, il faut aussi leur donner du pouvoir, de la puissance d'agir." M Gauchet "Give freedom to people is not enough, we also have to give them the power to use this freedom, to act". M Gauchet ------------- http://yjacolin.gloobe.org http://softlibre.gloobe.org _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss Warning: Information provided via electronic media is not guaranteed against defects including translation and transmission errors. If the reader is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this information in error, please notify the sender immediately. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
