Hello, I'm writing you because I would like to start an effort to translate the Documentation in Italian. I would like also to express the idea of providing guide lines for translations. A looked a bit in the archive but I did not find anything about these two topics (Italian translation, guide lines for translations). I know that there are already translations for Asian languages but I am not able to find the history of them. I do not know if translations in European languages are going to be accepted (perhaps there is the assumption that everyone knows English in the European continent and it is a waste of energy to do translations[?]). For example, even if French and Germans are quite active there are not translations yet in their language: is there a particular reason or simply nobody did it? Why === There is nothing better for understanding than our own mother tongue, and reading Documentation is one of those activities where it is important to understand its message rather than learning a different language (there are dedicated books and courses for that). This is especially true for young developers and new-comers who are really focused on understanding Linux and a different language can be an obstacle sometimes. I personally had a couple of experiences where I pointed people to the documentation and I had to explain English rather than Linux. Very competent people but they were not used to use English every day. I put myself in this list of people who prefer the mother tongue language when it is time to really understand something. I work for an international organization in a country that is not mine with people coming from all around the European continent and our common tongue is bad-English with all its dialects and accents: true-English (with its own dialects), spaghetti-English, kartoffel-English, paella-English, formage-English and more. Misunderstanding is not rare, and sometimes express ourselves takes more time than needed. This is another reason why I believe that for understanding purposes is good to read in our own mother tongue. Plan ==== If you agree with the need to support different translations, I would like to do the Italian one. But first I would like to open a little discussion about translations "how to write translations"; this discussion should produce a document (in English) with guide lines for translator (e.g. Documentation/ translation/howto.rst): what to translate first, what to NOT translate, how to structure it. Once this is defined I will start the Italian translation (I already have some documents translated). How to do translations (IMHO) ----------------------------- Here my personal guide lines for translations - Translate only sphinx-ready documents, do not translate documents which are not yet sphinx. We should avoid useless double work; at some point, I guess, everything will be sphinx. - Include in all documents a disclaimer saying that English is the main reference (use sphinx directive 'include' to include it). - Include in all documents a reference to the English version. So it will be easy jump to the original document. - Translate in order: non-technical documents (they are stable, useful for a wider group of people (developers and managers): process/, doc-guide/ ), technical documents about key concepts (they are stable, and important for new-comers), subsystems (the big picture is stable, typically they do not describe all little details that may change), and then other documents - avoid scattered translations: try to finish one "topic" before translating something else Probably there is much more, that's why I would like to have a little discussion about it. Thanks for reading everything :) -- Federico Vaga http://www.federicovaga.it/ -- 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
