2005/5/26, Mark Leicester <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > One of the reasons I installed the i18n module into Planet Cocoon was > that I noticed internationalisation mentioned as a feature the "Doco" > proposal, which Antonio recently linked to at the end of this long > thread about documentation (http://www.planetcocoon.com/en/node/1969): > http://wiki.apache.org/cocoon/Doco > > I agree, it would be easier for everyone (who speaks good English) if > we removed this requirement!
Mark's initiative is fully coherent with our motivation at Planet Cocoon : making Cocoon documentation closer to its users (and once again, its users are not only its developers). We are trying to make a documentation platform which is simpler to use and write for. And now with this new i18n module we just opened the door to people who understand English enough to read, but not to write. The way I see it, we will mostly use that as another input, another potential source of documentation but we have to setup a converter on that input, translators to keep the documentation coherent and prevent the above mentioned maintenance problems. Of course I agree our priority is to get a good core English documentation. But it appears obvious to me that it's far easier to translate an existing documentation than to create one from scratch in a language that is not natural to you. It's just a matter of... separation of concerns : the author has the ideas, the translator has the language, reviewers have the knowledge to verify, etc. Finally the greatest advantage of this internationalization thing is that we will be able to eventually setup forums in other languages, which should help spread Cocoon community and get this tool closer to the user (always the same motivation). How did you guys react when the French mailing list was setup ? Let me just translate a small part of Sylvain's introduction in Cocoon French area... " Why a French area ? On the occasion of the many contacts I had with Cocoon users in France, whether it was through French-speaking sites such as XMLfr or directly, it came to me that few of them were subsribed to the English-speaking mailing list, and that many of them weren't aware of the importance of the community in open source projects. That's why the French area has been created, to make it possible for French-speaking Cocoon users (and not only French ones) to join the great Apache community to share, discuss, and not to be alone anymore in front of the problems that occur when they use Cocoon. That area is likely to be limited to a few pages of general introduction and to the mailing list. Translating the whole documentation is a huge task that we are not ready to tackle on, unless some volunteer ! " Nothing to add, that's exactly what we want to achieve : share widely, because Open Source should also mean Open Community, and not a community that just says "we don't need them, we have enough work to do here"... -- Sebastien ARBOGAST
