Lost in translation

Spotted this slightly depressing IRC snippet tucked away on the GNOME marketing-list yesterday:

(03:42:26 PM) danilo: qgil: as a matter of fact, other approaches bring
results we had with documentation for the past 4 years: no documentation
has been translated to any language except for Sun contributed
translations, and they were too hard to update because we only had
docbook source on them

(03:42:48 PM) danilo: so, basically, we had to dump almost all of sun contributed translations

Could Sun have done more to avoid this? Were we made aware of the problem at the time? We still do sucky things occasionally, especially in the corners of the company (including L10N) who don’t yet live and breathe open source in the way most of us do now, but I certainly hope we can learn from any mistakes we made here.

2 thoughts on “Lost in translation”

  1. It basically had nothing to do with Sun. It had to do with methods for updating translations: anyone willing to update them had to go through the process of diff-ing different DocBook XML (actually, SGML, but that’s not the big issue) versions, watching what has changed in the original, and then updating the translation with those changes. A very error-prone procedure.

    Basically, all the translations have been outdated at the time we switched to gnome-doc-utils (starting last year), with last updates to docs coming from Sun in 2003 (I think). The procedure for reusing some of the translation (which is still not a small amount, yet with the rocking stuff our current doc writers do, it’s getting smaller and smaller) is outlined at

    http://live.gnome.org/GnomeDocUtilsTranslationMigration

    (i.e. the “-r” option to xml2po was added just to allow us to make use of the big amount of existing translations mostly provided by Sun). However, this requires that someone familiar with the language in question actually does the switch, because it may get tricky at some point.

    The translations which have not been migrated are listed at

    http://live.gnome.org/GnomeDocUtilsMigration

    in the “Translations to do” column. You can probably notice a pattern there (eg. de, es, it, …, zh_CN, zh_TW, which were the languages Sun maintained).

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