Re: documentation translation

[John Mandereau]

Le dimanche 05 novembre 2006 à 15:02 -0800, Graham Percival a écrit :
> John Mandereau wrote:
> > A number of French users have created a page or a section about Lily on
> > their personal sites, sometimes with briliant ideas and words explaining
> > what LilyPond is and does. That's great and bad at the same time. It's
> > great because this work is independent from the LilyPond team, and
> > therefore berings more different points of view;  and it's bad because it
> > certainly doesn't have the audience of lilypond.org.
> 
> I recognize your point about having more different points of view... but 
> if more people joined the devel team, we could have those different 
> points of view from the outset.

Of course. I hope I manage to convince the authors of these pages to
contribute to the docs. I would be glad to join the devel team, but I'm
very busy with mathematics and oboe studies. My current participation to
LilyPond is:
- maintaining French translation of lilypond.org and LilyPond messages
(very little work actually)
- administrating and moderating the address@hidden list
(essentially spam filtering and replies on general issues)
- (in progress) extending makefiles and writing scripts to make posible
a translation of the user manual integrated with the English one.

When the latter is done, I will manage translation of the user manual,
which means at least checking translations and committing them to cvs. I
can't take other LilyPond jobs for the coming months. All this benefits
the French-speaking community, but I'm sure it will benefits the entire
community sooner or later thanks to reciprocal translation, too.


> > It might be worth
> > encouraging these authors to contribute to the French docs, and/or
> > creating a "Planet LilyPond" page listing links to these sites.
> 
> Is the market big enough?  -- I mean, are there _so_ many pages that 
> it's impossible to incorporate their useful documentation material into 
> the main manual?  (this is my view on the wiki: there aren't enough 
> people contributing to it to really make it worthwhile)

No, certainly not. Computer music notation is a very specialized work,
it will always have less users than word processors. So to be the most
efficient, the community should ideally not be too spread out, but very
close to the devel team.


> For example, consider Geoff Horton's lilypond lyrics page.  I haven't 
> seen it recently (and I don't have an internet connection at the 
> moment), but my impression was that if somebody spent a two hours 
> integrating that material into the current docs, Geoff's page would be 
> unnecessary.  (The only reason I haven't done that is that I don't do 
> lyrics)

Sorry, I have neither done any yet, so I currently can't do anything for
that.


> In the case of the French pages, I suppose that I _could_ integrate them 
> (I haven't spoken or read French for ten years, but I was fluent before 
> that))... but I'm having enough trouble keeping up with the main doc 
> stuff and bug reports.

Don't worry about this: if a French piece of documentation that's not a
translation from English is added, I'll submit it to you, in English of
course!


> It would be nice if we had a "Translation Doc Helper" -- somebody who 
> looked for good doc tips in other languages and translated them into 
> English so we could include them in the manual.  Any volunteers?

There can't be only one "Translation Doc Helper" as soon as the docs are
in many languages, there should be one per language instead. I may take
the "French Translation Doc Helper" job when the makefiles
infrastructure for translating the user manual is done (I've been
working on this for a few days and that's not finished...).

Cheers,
-- 
John Mandereau <address@hidden>