discuss: Questions yes answers no
Subject:
Re: Questions yes answers no
From:
####@####.####
Date:
3 Mar 2005 08:50:54 -0000
Message-Id: <Pine.LNX.4.60.0503031757040.1101@client1.linuxstuff.net.au>
> Are there some really good HOWTOs in other languages that should be
> translated into English? We don't really know (at least I don't).
> Translation the other way is common. Machine translation by free
> software ??
I can read Italian, Spanish and some Portuguese. The Italian HOWTOs are
mostly pretty out of date, a document would need to be up to date and
popular/important to warrant a serious translation effort.
The Spanish area seems light on actual HOWTOs, but has a fairly rich
variety of "tutorials" and other interesting stuff. The Portuguese area
has quite a lot of translations completed from English, but I can't see
much new material.
Machine translation is imperfect as anyone who uses BabelFish etc knows,
but it may get some translators going at least. Some serious work on
machine translation of just Linux documentation would probably yield
better results but that is a huge project.
There is a good paper in Spanish in the LDP Spanish area on translation.
It may be possible to use some ideas from the commercial world where
vendors of all types are adopting semi-automated processes to manage
multiple language translations of documentation (and savings millions of
dollars a year in some cases). This involves, among other things, ensuring
that technical terms are translated consistently across a document and
across multiple versions of documents etc. We may be talking about a level
of control here that is beyond where TLDP wants to go, but which would
probably be very useful if the goal was to have all HOWTOs in all
supported languages.
I think there are probably some guidelines that could go in to the
Reviwers HOWTO about making documents easier to translate, the usual stuff
about avoiding idioms and slang that is difficult to translate.
Mick
