Hi Alex,
Le Monday 05 November 2007 12:15:27 Frank Peters, vous avez écrit :
Hi Frank, and everyone else :-)
I am dreaming ;-) of a real time switching solution that
allows one to switch languages on a certain wiki page
which at the same time would it make easy to localize a page.
I'll raise here a few points I've just raised on the French N-L doc list :
1) How do we prevent this from becoming labyrinthine, or rather, how can we
ensure that a user will find the docs that they are looking for, other than
by drilling down through the wiki ?
Either through search or through having the available presented in an
accessible way. wiki/Documentation does it by having a hierarchical
catalog. Another possibility would be to use categories wisely.
2) If I enter a search term in French, will it search for anything related
thereto and point to links to stuff in other languages ?
In my experience, no (the same can be said of OOoAuthors BTW). For me, that
represents one hell of a handicap. Not just as a user of the doc, but also as
a voluntary translator.
The wiki doesn't have such intelligence (and I don't know of any system
that has), but it would be a neat feature.
We all know that each language culture finds another's form of expression more
or less important or appropriate, and this is ostensibly true of
documentation. What might be an excellent tutorial in one language could be
completely inappropriate when translated, unless the translation is also
adapted to that language's own cultural practices.
This is a very general (almost philosophical) question when discussing
localizations. One advantage of the wiki approach is that it's
topic based, so a translator can decide how to best cover a topic
for his/her own audience, other than the localizations that are
paragraph based where you have little room for cultural aspects
of localizations.
3) Can we not have a mechanism whereby any new documentation published on the
wiki is signalled to a system like an IssueTracker for translators, to which
volunteer translators would subscribe and be informed in real-time (sic) of
the new documents made available ? The translator could then volunteer to
The easiest way is to subscribe to the recent changes rss feed and
filter it to just display the content changes and addition you're
interested in. I am doing that right now with a little hack having
all interesting changes mailed to me on an hourly basis. It's a simple
technical sollution butt works quite well.
take up the work, relinquish it or redelegate it to someone else (or the
community at large) according to the circumstances. I don't see any
possibility for this at the moment with the current infrastructure, but maybe
I'm wrong. If we can't organise the submissions and work in some kind of
coherent way, the wiki will rapdily become a nightmare to navigate in. This
I agree that it would be beneficial to have a highly organized CMS
in place that allows for all of this. But I don't see how we could
easily achieve that right now. I am suggesting a light-weight solution
to bring NLC and English doc content closer together, but this doesn't
have to be the final state (actually, I hope it won't).
would also be beneficial to Sun's in house translation service, since, if
I've understood correctly, there may be elements of interest that Sun might
include in its own documentation and taken from the wiki, although I doubt
that the resources are available to have someone trawl the wiki for new
content unless this is flagged in some way that is accesible in an easy to
use manner.
Like I said, the recent changes feed allows you to monitor additions
or changes to the wiki. There also is a template Documentation/Candidate
that, if added to a wiki page, flags it as a potential Docs candidate
(whatever that actually means).
Just a few thoughts and suggestions, I honestly don't know whether any of this
is doable ;-)
Thanks, Alex. Some is, actually. :-)
Frank
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