This month I participated in several long threads about translating kernel documentation into other languages, primarily Japanese and Chinese. (I cc'd some but not all of them here.) http://kernel.org/doc now links to the websites http://www.linux.or.jp and http://zh-kernel.org, which are respectively japanese and chinese linux kernel communities that have offered to translate documentation. (I asked if it made more sense to link directly to the documentation or to the top level communities, and was consistently told the top level.) A big issue during the debate was that translating documentation encourages the creation of patches that cannot be merged into the kernel, because the developers of the patch don't have the English language skills necessary to submit their patch to linux-kernel and answer questions about it from other developers. Matt Mackall proposed the position of language maintainer, someone to translate descriptions and questions to facilitate patch submissions from non-english developers. I followed up up this and tracked down some candidates for the position. A chinese language maintainer (Li Yang) has now accepted the position (see http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/7/12/199 and http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/7/13/173 ) and along the way I wrote up a description of the position as I saw it. (In this case, the language maintainer is actually a single point of contact for a mailing list of translators. See the thread for details.) Another issue is keeping translations up to date. On the advice of Eric Raymond, I'm not hosting translated copies but instead linking to copies put on the web by the translators. Eric has found that if he hosts translations of his writings, they never get updated. If he links to translations hosted by the translators, they get updated. I also don't recommend checking translated documentation into the kernel tarball, but that isn't my call. I notice that Greg KH disagrees with basically every issue I've ever talked to him about. I haven't tried reverse psychology on him yet to see if it's causal, but see http://lwn.net/Articles/242541/ and note that I expect it to be merged. *shrug* Oh well. (I'm not maintaining it, I can't even read it. Not my problem.) Another issue is which documentation to translate? The primary goal is to translate the community documentation; many developers have some technical English but get hung up on cultural issues. I proposed a list (see http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/7/12/243 ), which seems to have been accepted (with a few corrections) as a reasonable starting point. Off-list I'm still in discussions with Satoru Ueda of Sony on finding a Japanese language maintainer, and also what additional documentation needs to be written to explain western open source culture to Japanese developers and Japanese managers. There are a dozen or so people cc'd on this thread (half of them Japanese), and I've read books shorter than this thread. Most of it's about cultural differences; when it gets around to resulting in new documentation for me to write I'll cc: that here. Rob -- "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." - Ken Thompson. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
