Fwd: manpage i18n miniproject

[Clytie Siddall]

[Addressed to the findutils maintainers at GNU and copied to the  
Pootle and TP mailing lists.]

Hello :)

Under the auspices of The Translation Project at the University of  
Montréal, with the support of the Translate Project at Sourceforge,  
including the online translation project Pootle, and the help of the  
Debian po4a project, my language team wish to negotiate with you a  
possible process for testing and distributing localized versions of  
manpages.

I gather this has been discussed in the past, but perhaps not  
followed through. As an initial stage, I have translated the find(1)  
manpage into Vietnamese. We did this by using the po4a tool to  
convert between the (n)roff format and .po file format. Much of the  
translation was done in the .po format on Pootle. The translation is  
complete. The file is now being converted back into (n)roff format.

We can test that format on our OSS forum (VNOSS), encouraging our  
users on different systems to try out this localized manpage, but  
although I realize there are already informal localized versions of  
manpages in various languages available from different sources  
online, I don't think there is any formal localization process for  
manpages, including maintaining currency, a release schedule and  
language-specific feedback.

What would you see as an effective model for localizing and  
distributing the resulting manpages? We are willing to adapt to fit  
the GNU processes, and very much want to produce excellent pieces of  
documentation for our user communities.

I will write a brief report on the process for the initial manpage,  
including testing and feedback, and when the second stage is  
complete, with several more manpages translated, tested and being  
used, I will write an initial guideline for other language  
communities to use when translating manpages. Thus your place in the  
process is crucial. I look forward to hearing your ideas on how this  
should be done, and hopefully, to my language community working with  
you longterm on localizing manpages.

The Translation Project is willing to host the translation process  
itself, so your existing processes for the translation of files like  
findutils can be extended to cover manpages.

Now is a good time to share ideas, so we can make this happen  
creatively.

(If I get any more enthusiastic or formal, I'll sound like a  
Nigerian, so I'll leave it at that. ;) )

I'll look forward to hearing from you about this. It's a worthwhile  
project, IMHO.

from Clytie (vi-VN, team/nhóm Gnome-vi)

Clytie Siddall--Renmark, in the Riverland of South Australia

Ở thành phố Renmark, tại miền sông của Nam Úc

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