Hello Serge,

On 2024-01-15 15:38, Сергей Казорин via vbox-dev wrote:

Hi,

Since VirtualBox is a great state of the art application, we at Alt Linux Team would like to start with a quality translation of the documentation into Russian.

Definitely a challenge which no one has recently tackled (we have Russian translations of the manpages but not a single translation of the manual itself).

As far as I see we can just follow steps of the French translator using the same XML-files, or if it is not that simple we would be very pleased to hear from you where should we start.

You can effectively forget what the French translator has done in the past: it was too many years ago. The last update was in July 2014. We have removed the French translation completely a while ago because it was too outdated to be useful (tried contacting the volunteer but never received any response).

The need to start from scratch is true for another reason: With VirtualBox 7.0 the official documentation was changed into DITA format (the VirtualBox source code contains a slightly aged DocBook variant), and with VirtualBox 7.1 DITA is also used in the VirtualBox source.

So you need to find a sensible translation workflow for documentation in DITA format - which might benefit somewhat from the smaller chunks of information but might need different tools to be reasonably productive with keeping the translation up to date.

Note that the manpages will remain in DocBook format (what DITA offers in this area is very poor, and we came up with our own converter for this specific use case). Not that there is much work expected in this area, just when new CLI features are added and the manpage content is improved.

Oh, and a final bit: since translating the documentation is a very significant contribution I'd encourage you to go for the Oracle Contributor Agreement to avoid any ambiguity...

Best,
Klaus


Sincerely yours,
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