Subject: how to keep translators happy
From: Piotr Banski (bansp@bigfoot.com)
Date: Sat Jan 26 2002 - 10:51:53 CST
The reason I forwarded my previous mail to Ivan/kiwi to the list is that
such things may start occurring more often if the maintainer info is not
kept up-to-date and is not made accessible. And it's a horrible feeling to
see someone waste their work (or to be that person).
So here's a few suggestions and a request:
- make it possible to access the credits info easily from the www pages.
The file http://www.abisource.com/~sam/docs/CREDITS.TXT which
help->credits (both online and Abi-internal) directs you to does not
exist. I also checked under 'About AbiWord' and 'FAQ' which seemed to me
to be places where one might look for such info, and I failed to find it.
- add a piece of information in the Contribute->Translate section of the
site on what to do to avoid wasting your time/nerves in this manner.
Below, I attach a fragment of an unfinished doc that I have been preparing
(slowly *sigh* -- my deadlines are killing me) as a suggestion.
- finally, a request: could someone please put my name into the credits
file as maintainer of Polish strings? Yes I did get a (profuse) blessing
from the previous maintainer ;-) TIA. (I haven't had access to the source
for a while now so I can't check -- maybe my info is there already but I
doubt that.)
The doc fragment follows.
Best,
Piotr
-----------------------------------
Step 2. Announcing your intentions to the world
This is a very important step, as it may well happen that someone is
already working on adding or maintaining support for your language, and
you don't want to waste your time on translating strings only to learn
that the maintainer has done that in the meantime. And the other way
round: when you become the maintainer, you will expect your time and work
not to get wasted by others in this way.
There are three ways to locate the maintainer of strings for your
language.
If you happen to have the source distribution, look at
abi/CREDITS.TXT, in the most recent source version that you can find -- do
bear in mind that this information need not always be up-to-date.
If you locate the .strings file for your language, look at its
beginning for some information on the current maintainer. You should
usually find their address there. But again, this need not always be
up-to-date, as it may happen that there is a new maintainer who is in the
process of messing around with strings for your language but hasn't put
his name into the .strings file yet.
The third way appears to be the safest and should generally be
used whether you succeed with the first two or not: announce your
intention on the abiword-dev mailing list and ask about the status of your
language's translation. Do use a meaningful subject for your email. Note
that in case there is no support whatsoever for your language in the
current version of AbiWord, you will need someone to install that support
for you -- for your translations to be displayed by Abi, they have to be
installed first :-)
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