Re: Translating Emacs manuals is of strategic importance

[Stefan Kangas]

Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:

> If that be so, why is it of great importance for us to distribute these
> translations ourselves, further undermining our public image by their
> raw nature?

Thanks for voicing your concerns.  I think I see now where you are
coming from.

I understand your concern about not distributing and promoting something
half-baked.  I myself have had some serious concerns about the quality
of translations in Free Software, and I have voiced those concerns here
in the past.  It would even be fair to say that I myself have taken a
defeatist stance at times.

Still, I note that many people are happy to be using the translations
that exist, and consider that better than reading English.  This
observation, and thinking about this more strategically from the point
of view of promoting GNU and Emacs, has lead me to revise my stance.

With more users will also come people interested in contributing.  If we
have nothing at all, on the other hand, it is not so easy to see how to
get the ball rolling.

I also note that for French, we already have a professional translator
on board (Jean-Christophe).  We can attract others in the future.  And
Vincent has volunteered time to this as well, of course.

> It is not worth inventing elaborate systems for classifying or
> disclaiming manuals and judging which we are directly responsible for,
> when another option is to simply refuse involvement in the development
> of such non-essential manuals and leave the forces of interest to take
> their course, to no detriment of actual readers.

I believe that we can get around the public perception issue by having
the work principally take place on master, but without distributing
unfinished translations in the release tarball.  This was the intention
when I proposed having a "nursery" for translations that aren't yet
complete.

There is also _no_rush_ with marking a translation as finished.  If it
takes a decade or two, then so be it.  Emacs is not going away, and
neither are the fact that humans use different languages.  It won't be
worse than the current situation; I think it will be better in many
ways.

I'm still interested in knowing if anyone sees any serious issues with
the basic idea of keeping a nursery.  The exact details would have to be
worked out, of course, including what we call it.

>> We could perhaps consider having several "tiers" of manuals: one
>> "nursery" for those are not yet meaningfully ready for distribution, one
>> "attic" for those that are no longer reasonably maintained, and one for
>> those that we actually do consider up to scratch.  The decision for what
>> goes where could be based on a dialogue between the maintainers and the
>> translators of various manuals.
>
> This scheme is far too complicated for the number of translations or
> translators on the horizon.

I know that you disagree, but _if_ we were to develop translations of
on master, how would you propose going about it?

It is clear that we don't want to distribute and/or promote manuals that
are not yet finished.