[Sugar-devel] Potential volunteer offering technical writing

[Christoph Derndorfer]

On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 7:20 AM, Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 1:12 AM, Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 7:19 PM, Martin Langhoff
> > <martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 6:25 PM, Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>> In any refresh of the XO manual (Help Activity),  I would very much
> >>> appreciate if some structural choices could be made to facilitate the
> >>> internationalization of the text
> >>
> >> Agreed on the general goal. My understanding is that the Help activity
> >> is assembled from content from several manuals about sugar and
> >> activities, created and edited at FLOSS Manuals.
> >>
> >> I suspect that FLOSS Manuals has a means to maintain translated
> >> versions, not sure how well it works, but several existing manuals
> >> offer alternative language versions.
> >>
> >> Maybe the FLOSS manuals platforms is terminally borked in this regard,
> >> I honestly hope not. Because Pootle is not suited for this style of
> >> documentation -- we sure want something wiki-ish that handles
> >> paragraphs, tables, embedded images...
>
> (earlier message sent prematurely)
>
> I need to spend a little bit of time on FLOSSManuals,  I'd heard
> something about hem incorporating booki
>
>  http://www.booki.cc/
>
> but I have not investigated it extensively since then to see how much
> of an improvement it is with regards to L10n.
>
> L10n of long-form content is an area where I think there are some
> excellent bits and pieces, but I'm not convinced that there is a
> really nice end-to-end solution yet.  I think very highly of
> FLOSSManuals as a book publishing platform, but was less than
> impressed with it's L10n workflow.  I am happy that several of the
> Sugar OLPC boks have been translated, but these have been time-focused
> efforts requiring a lot of coordination and not amenable to the slower
> accumulation of collaborative work that characterizes Poolte L10n
> work.
>
> I like also wikislicing as a content collection method and Wikimedia's
> WikiBook effort has some superb features with respect to content
> collection and publishing.  To the extent that orthologous articles
> exist across wikis it can also address L10n, essentially by slicing
> "pre-localized" content.
>
> Unfortunately, while the PDF output from WikiBooks is quite
> beautifully formatted, it's size is large and PDFs are not that easy
> to edit after the fact.
>
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/File:TamTamSuite_collection.pdf
>
> The ,odt output option from WikiBooks is easier to edit, but I think
> it has real deficiencies in formatting, and IMHO, is frankly ugly.
>
> However, both of these formats produce rather large files compared to
> simple HTML and an HTML output option is not currently available.
>
> My reasoning on requesting availability of a plain text version is
> that facilitates bringing the strings to the localizer, instead of
> forcing you to bring the localizer to the strings (and a new tool).
> Admittedly, this has its; own flaws and requires more substantial
> post-processing to get a nicely formatted product.
>
> The ideal all-singing, all-dancing long-form L10n tool with content
> management system features and e-publishing features may be out there,
> but I haven't seen it yet.  I do welcome others to join in the
> exploration of the various options and techniques for cobbling
> together a workflow that optimally meets our needs, but most of all, I
> encourage thinking about i18n / L10n in all aspects of our work.
>

Cjl,

thanks a lot for reminding us about the importance of localization:-)

Samy from France was kind enough to collect some links and information for
translation tools in another thread ("Open translation tools") and I hope to
have some time to look at them in some detail before I head to San
Francisco.

Maybe what we should try to do is try to compile some sort of good practice
guide for translation of documentation (as opposed to software itself) for
these types of events...

Cheers,
Christoph

-- 
Christoph Derndorfer

editor, OLPC News [www.olpcnews.com]
volunteer, OLPC (Austria) [www.olpc.at]

e-mail: christoph at derndorfer.eu
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