Frields's suggestion

[Domingo Becker]

2009/4/27 Tian Shixiong <tiansworld at gmail.com>:
> Well, I think the suggestion is a good idea. And also this can make
> the list shorter :-)

You're right Tian, maybe the list would become long now. It wasn't
long a couple of years ago. Some day we will have at least 4 active
translator for every language and the list would be [1] 86 x 4 = 344
lines long (6 A4 pages at least).

One solution is Paul's option 2 in [2].
With a small addition. For the Spanish translation it's only necessary
to know who wrote the document and who translated it into Spanish. In
the Spanish version it's not necessary to know who translated it to
Chinese (Simplified) or to Zulu, there's a very small chance that a
Spanish speaking person would read it, or even care about it.
This addition would work the same as the translator-credits string of
other modules, that has been discussed in this list back in 2006 and
2007. That string has the names of the people and the year they worked
with the module as a translator. As a result, the name of the people
who translated to the actual language only appears in "Help -> About
-> Credits -> Translated by" of system-config-printer, for example. In
Spanish, you only see the Spanish translators, not the others.
By the way, not every module honours that string, but that's another subject.

I think of the list as a way to say "thanks" to the people who helped
with the translations. Remember it's a free work. It's also a way to
bring more people to be active translators.
The install-guide, for example, is 3653 strings long. If we have 25
string in an A4 page, it would be 146 pages long. How do you ask
somebody to help you translate such a big document for free?
A way I used is to tell people that their names will be somewhere in the guide.

The maintenance work of the list is too much work for the editors. I
would prefer they spend their time to bring the deployment-guide [3]
from RHEL to Fedora, the way they did with install-guide now in this
release. So the maintenance work must be splited and the teams should
help.

But I humbly think we can't stop saying thanks to the people who
helped us. A mention in a web page would get lost, the same way the
translations and some suggestions given in the old moin-moin web page
were lost. In the doc itself it would last forever, because
docs.fedoraproject.org remains after every change, and you may read
any doc from older releases whenever you want to.


[1] the 86 comes from https://translate.fedoraproject.org/tx/languages/

[2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-trans-list/2008-March/msg00132.html

[3] http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-5-manual/Deployment_Guide-en-US/index.html


kind regards

Domingo Becker (es)