On 05/23/11 15:53, Markus Bergelin wrote:
> I am willing to help out in that regard, and would appreciate some
> help as to were to start.
Hi Markus,
sorry for a late reply. A good start is getting familiar with how we
work; there's a short howto for translators at our web [1] along with a
few pointers to more technical documentation [2].
After you'll have read that, you should know *how* to translate, how to
deal with our XML files etc etc. What you won't know is the missing
part, though, and that is that annoying fact that translating stuff
takes a lot of work and requires an enormous amount of patience. You'll
probably start working alone, translating the most important documents.
Later on, maybe after half a year, a couple of people will join you,
trying to help. Their contributions will be of varying quality, some
will require full rewrites, others would be great. You'll still waste
hours proofreading the texts, carefully comparing their translations to
the English originals. Nobody will step up and help you with keeping the
translations up to date, though, because translating new stuff is
Creative and Sexy and Cool, but maintaining existing stuff is boring and
uncool, because your creativity is vastly limited. And that's the
situation where most people eventually give up and declare the
translation effort more or less dead. I should know, I'm a lead of the
(dead) Czech translation.
Well, if I did not manage to drive you off yet, congratulations, you're
probably that kind of guy we need. So, please go through the documents
and start filing translations via Bugzilla.
If I did manage to sway your opinion away from translating, I've got a
good news for you -- we could use a few hands with good skills in
English. The GDP is currently severely understaffed, and having a look
at our open bugs [3] should tell you what needs attention.
Have fun,
Jan
[1]
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gdp/doc/translators-howto.xml [2]
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gdp/#doc_chap4 [3]
http://bugs.gentoo.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=CONFIRMED&bug_status=IN_PROGRESS&product=Doc%20Other&product=Docs-developer&product=Docs-user&product=Documentation --
Trojita, a fast e-mail client --
http://trojita.flaska.net/
