[Ubuntu-manual] Not happy at all

[Khaled Hosny]

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 11:26:47AM -0600, Kevin Godby wrote:
> We've tossed around the idea of ditching Launchpad and creating our
> own translation system, but I haven't had time to research the issue
> or think about it much yet.  We'd need to sit down with translators,
> editors, and developers to establish what our needs are and what a
> translation system is actually capable of doing.  If you have any
> suggestions or ideas with regard to this sort of thing (or would like
> to kick off a discussion about it), I'd love to hear them!

Recently I worked on Arabic translation of "FOSS localisation manual[1]"
and there were also French and Spanish translations. The files are
hosted on a Pootle server[2] with translators either working on-line or
off-line (I work off-line myself). Merging updates of English text were
straight forward and no translations were lost. The English manual were
written on OOo ans saved as ODT file, converted to PO, and translations
were converted back to ODT files (though I ended up typesetting the
final Arabic version using TeX[3] because I don't like the un-typography
of office suites).

I'm not suggesting you use Pootle (though I think it is a great tool)
but merely highlighting that translating a book collaboratively on a
tool originally designed for software translation need not to suck.


[1] http://www.africanlocalisation.net/foss-localisation-manual
[2] http://pootle.locamotion.org/projects/foss_manual/
[3] http://www.khaledhosny.org/node/160

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer