Frank Peters wrote: Hi Frank,
It would be good to have some sufficiently bilingual community members to help with getting non-English content into English (if we want to see English as "root language").
Yes, unfortunately, these people seem to be few and far between. Counting myself modestly ;-) in as trilingual EN/FR/DE, I have probably only met about a dozen people on these various lists who have appeared or stated themselves to be sufficiently at ease with working (voluntarily to boot ;-) ) in more than one language on a day-to-day basis. As any translator will tell you, translation takes time, even if you ignore styles, idioms, target culture, etc. Nobody wants to produce a translated text that is incomprehensible to the target audience, so that also weighs in the balance when people offer to volunteer.
I admit that this is a tough one but we're probably wasting a lot of good effort right now. I'm not saying I have an answer for how to resolve this, though.
I would agree that a lot of effort is probably wasted in duplication, but there are also use cases that are prevalent in one language culture and not in another, which means that some documents produced in a first language may not necessarily be relevant to other language cultures.
Yes, "the master=English, all other langs=translated" approach is pretty formal (and actually the model used inside Sun). The beauty of this is the ease of administration and coordination. But for community work this would also mean to demote non-English doc contributors to be "mere" translators and a lot of talent would probably be wasted.
Indeed, not only talent, but also motivation.
I see what you mean. I know that I am stretching it now but should we have documentation guidelines available for other projects that would help us to leverage existing docs created in other projects?
It would probably be a good idea, since it seems to me that at present, most other project documentation has appeared more or less haphazardly.
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