Vincent Snijders wrote:
About translations, I always feel awkward reading Dutch translations of
programming related documents and most of the time I need to translate
them back to English (mentally) to understand them. So as far as I am
concerned translating is not necessary. Other people disagree, see the
translations on the lazarus wiki.
I absolutely agree with you, Dutch translations are usually awkward to read ;).
But I think is is partially due to our English-orientedness. Perhaps in other
countries, people are more dependent on their native language, and maybe hardly
understand any English.
On the other hand, maintaining documentation in different languages has certain
disadvantages.
Documentation, in particular of APIs, is like a 'contract' to which the code
should obey; in this regard is is best to consider one language version as
authoritative; the others would have to be translated from this version. As
English is probably understood best by most users, it is reasonable to make
this the authoritative language for all FPC/Lazarus documentation.
If a change or addition is made to the documentation, it will have to be
reflected in the translations as well. We will need some way to deal with that.
For example, the English version can have revision numbers, and of translated
versions, one could indicate up to which English revision it is up-to-date ---
if this is not the latest version, a user might want to look at the English
version; some 'diff' tools would be very useful here as well.
Conclusion:
Advantages:
- can attract more users
- can help people having problems with English to write better code, as they
now have documentation in their own language
Disadvantages:
- requires effort to keep translations consistent
- requires adaptation of help system
- people understanding English might tend to still use that version instead of
the one translated to their native language
- people might spent time and effort on translating documentation instead of
improving Laz ;)
I intend to extend fpdoc generated pages so they point to a wiki pages
where correction and additions can be made (this is long term) though.
When we make a lazarus 1.0 release, we can use httrack to extract all
data from the wiki and add that as documentation.
It would be very nice if people could edit documentation in a convenient way
such as a wiki; this is an improvement over sending .xml help file patches. On
the other hand it is also important that the documentation is correct and
coherent, particularly in its role as a 'contract'. Merging into the
documentation changes that can be made by just anybody, might need more
checking.
Still I consider it a nice option.
Regards,
Bram
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