[scribus] French doc

[Gregory Pittman]

On 07/18/2011 09:59 AM, Louis Desjardins wrote:
> 2011/7/10 Craig Bradney<cbradney at zip.com.au>
>
>> On 7/10/11 8:26 AM, Louis Desjardins wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> When I install 1.4 RC5 on Mac OS X I have access to "Aide>  Manuel de
>>> Scribus" (Help>  Scribus Manual) but it is in English.
>>>
>>> However it seems that on other platform the French Manual is accessible.
>> At
>>> least on Ale's machine, it is.
>>>
>>> How can I have access to this help on a Mac?
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> Commit 15825 removed the installation of anything but English docs, on
>> all platforms - as the others are way out of date.
>
>
> This needs to be nuanced.
>
> I am only aware of 3 languages total, including English (original text),
> French and German.
>
> It would be useful to have the sections tagged so we know what has been
> updated and what has not.
>
> For instance, large parts if not all parts of the various pages about Fonts
> (Fonts in depth, Non-Latin fonts, etc.) are in the same state they were at
> translation time and thus the FR translation for this part is still totally
> relevant.
>
> I can only suggest that we put a warning as a header to the sections that
> have been re-written so the readers know that a particular part have been
> significantly updated and they should refer to the English help and/or give
> a hand with the translation. This will increase the awareness about the need
> for good translation but can also serve as a basis for an updated text. One
> of the most difficult part in translating such texts as technical manual is
> the vocabulary and the co-occurrences (combination of words that you cannot
> find in a dictionary). Most of this job is now done in French and in German
> and can be of great help to translators taking over.
>
> I do not think that putting away all the translations just like that is the
> way to go.
>
> Mentioning "others are way out of date" seems a clear message but in fact it
> is too general as a statement. We need details at this point because in any
> event translation will be done word by word, sentence by sentence, section
> by section. We need to know which parts need care.
>
> At first glance we can also tell the Online Help is quite outdated itself in
> some aspects. One screenshot show 1.3.0 cvs. The list of release dates and
> versions stops Oct. 2010 with 1.3.9.
>
> As for the availability or relevantness of the other languages, the page My
> Tutorial has a link to a wiki page that is in English and refers to the
> Tutorial by Nyam Bushan which is available and easy to find on the Scribus
> website while the translation I made myself is much harder to find. I don’t
> discuss here about relevantness, I discuss the fact that this material is
> available in its original form in English and has a translation done in 2004
> and if one is available, the other should be too. In fact, I see no reason
> not to keep all that work available. They can by updated and/or translated
> in other languages. To my knowledge, this tutorial is one of the very few
> who talks about the PDF creation and edition capabillities of Scribus.
>

I think these are a number of valid points. Even within the realm of 
English doc updates, it gets hard to recognize which parts need updates 
and which do not. I suppose we need some scheme to help. One of the 
difficulties is that the age of a part of the docs isn't necessarily an 
indicator of a need to update.

Having said this, I am quite open to helping anyone who wishes to 
contribute to the documentation see what needs to be done, whether it's 
in the English or some other language section. It seems that Alessandro 
Levati will be helping to create a first-time Italian version of the 
online manual soon.

Whenever we have solid, helpful documentation, we all benefit. I don't 
know why anyone would believe that something must be created in English 
and then translated. We might as easily have new documentation in 
French, Italian, or German that gets translated to English later. This 
is exactly what happened with the Working with Master Pages article on 
the wiki, which originally was submitted in German.[1]

Once you get into contributing docs you realize that you don't need to 
ask permission to contribute. Clearly there are areas of greater need 
than others, but we have a larger problem with inertia than misdirected 
effort.

It would help me if someone could spell out the substantive pros and 
cons of various licencing options for the docs to help me understand why 
there are benefits or aggravations with one licence versus another... I 
am trying to submit work which can be freely used by anyone, but I would 
prefer not to have someone take this and make money from publishing it 
without paying back to Scribus in some way.

Greg

[1] http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Arbeiten_mit_Musterseiten