WineHQ

[Dimitrie O. Paun]

On Fri, 5 Sep 2003, Ivan Leo Murray-Smith wrote:

> Hi list,
> A guy that lives in my town found me via the linux counter, and we would like to
> translate the wine web site to italian, I was thinking of something like
> microsoft, with a drop menu of languages, where one can choose the destination
> language.
> This guy is also a really good web designer, and I could give him a hand as I'm
> a native english speaker and I could answer any emails we may get on an italian
> users mailing list, can we do this?  Would a flag be better than a drop menu?
> any ideas/sugestions welcome.

Translations are tricky in that it's relatively easy to get something 
translated, and very difficult to maintain it. This is a problem in
that oudate/incorrect information is more often worse than no information
(especially when there is english information that is more uptodate).
This is particulary bad when no active developer understands the
language so we can delete the file(s) then they are too out of date.

So from my POV, a translation for WineHQ would be nice provided:
  -- the WineHQ code supports it so that when a page is not
     available in the requested language, it defaults to english
  -- you have time, energy and determination to keep at it
     and actively track and update the parts you translated
  -- you start translating the relatively static portions of the
     site (this excludes documentation at this point, that one
     should be translated when we're close to 1.0)
  -- we set up a procedure that will give us a chance in keeping
     things maintained. By this I mean that all translations of
     page A should mention in their ChangeLog entries the CVS
     version of the english page it was based off of. With a bit
     of discipline, we can use this info to semi-automate the
     tracking of changes. See example below.

If we are to have translated versions of WineHQ, the site
should provide a menu for chosing the language, as well as
interpret and corectly respond to the language tags sent
by the browser. I guess you'll have to corner Jer for this.

Now, let me give you an example by what I meant with the
above mentioned procedure. Say you have a page 
 ../en/A.template
that is currently at version 1.4. You translate it and
commit it as
 ../it/A.template
with the following ChangeLog entry:
 Initial Italian translation.
 Based on 1.4.

Later on, someone comes along and updates the english
version to version 1.5. You can then look at the diff,
update the italian on and commit it:
  Update to 1.5.

Or some such thing. Let's setup a format for this things
(so we can programmatically parse and interpret them),
and stick to it come hell or high water :). In fact,
since WineHQ stuff goes through Jer, he should simply
reject all translation submission that don't follow
the format.

-- 
Dimi.