Translation status of the Ubuntu Server Guide

[Matthew East]

Hi David,

On 16 September 2010 18:36, David Planella <david.planella at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> El dj 16 de 09 de 2010 a les 10:26 -0400, en/na Adam Sommer va escriure:
>> My impression that translations would definitely be included in the
>> HTML and PDF versions.  I guess I don't understand how not packaging
>> the DocBook source means no translations?
>>
>
> Because we only ship the translations in the files we ship with yelp in
> the distro.

Given that the English server guide won't be shipped with the distro,
there is not a lot of point in shipping translated versions of the
server guide with the distro! However, we can and will continue to
translate the server guide through Launchpad and to download the
translations into our bzr branch so that they can be built to html and
pdf using the Makefile and instructions provided at
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/SystemDocumentation/BuildingDocumentation

If the PDF target isn't working for localisations, I'm sure it's easy
enough to fix that. I don't know too much about whether the toolchain
supports certain different language scripts, but I imagine that it
does, and that those more familiar with those scripts may well be able
to make the necessary adjustments for those to work. If it doesn't,
there isn't a lot that we can do, save for changing the toolchain
entirely, which I would not have a problem with if someone comes up
with a good alternative.

> There is support in the ubuntu-docs code by means of a script (or in the
> makefile) to generate translated HTML. However, and I'm assuming that
> the server guide will be made available in help.ubuntu.com,
> internationalization support is disabled in that site. This is something
> we've been discussing intermittently for quite a while, and from the
> feedback I've had on the lists and at UDS from LoCos and translation
> teams, it is something they'd really want, although we haven'T quite
> managed to unblock the discussion.

This is a general discussion of principle, rather than something
specifically to do with the server guide. If we ship translated
documents on help.ubuntu.com, we should do so for all the documents
shipped there, rather than just for one.

The discussion isn't blocked, it's always open, as I posted here:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/2010-September/015159.html

I've posted my view about this here:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/2010-May/014775.html

But my view is not binding, and if others rebut my points and there is
a strong consensus the other way, then that's fine. But I haven't seen
a lot of discussion about this.

The solution I've proposed, i.e. to use
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Website/WebsiteLocalization, doesn't seem to
have been implemented yet - perhaps someone would be interested in
getting involved with that to help Chris?

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF