Release-note is long and hard for translating

[Ruediger Landmann]

Dimitris Glezos wrote:
> 2009/5/6 Ruediger Landmann <r.landmann at redhat.com>:
>   
>> Noriko Mizumoto wrote:
>>     
>>> During today's FLP meeting, another idea came up to address this issue
>>> from l10n team side that is to break the file in small chunks.
>>> Could you kindly assess the feasibility and the scope of this idea?
>>>
>>>       
>> As some of you know, Publican works with multiple small po files rather
>> than the one big po file that you're seeing at the moment. In fact, to
>> build the documents, the docs team has to break up the po files that
>> translators are contributing so that we can feed the multiple small
>> files back into Publican.
>>
>> On 29 April, Dimitris announced that Transifex 0.6 has support for
>> multiple po files in the same component and that Fedora's Transifex
>> instance will be updated to this version after Fedora 11 is out. You can
>> see a screenshot of this feature on the Transifex page here:
>> http://docs.transifex.org/releases/0.6.html (scroll down to "Multiple
>> files per language").
>>     
>
> Rudi, I think the translators are mostly worried that the document as
> a whole is large, not that the PO files themselves are large.
>   

Yes, I know that there's an issue there (although there are fewer new 
strings in the F11 Release Notes than there were in the F10 Release 
Notes), but the specific question here was about the possibility of 
working with multiple small .po files rather than one gigantic one.

I can see that this question came up in the recent FLP meeting:

----
<tombolinux> huge docs make the translation impossible for little teams.
my team internally break big .pos in chunks...
<noriko> let's see anyway to break it into small chunks.
----

Am I right in thinking that Transifex 0.6 makes this possible? If so, 
translators will be able to work with Publican's multiple small .po 
files, and writers won't have to be merging these files together and 
separating them again after translation... which should be good news for 
everybody :)

> The Q I have is: Should we continue pushing the big release notes, or
> should we consider either reducing their size or producing a compact
> version which will be more easy to translate and probably more
> compelling to our users as well, similar to eg. GNOME release notes?
>
>   

Discussion is already underway in docs about what form the Release Notes 
should take for Fedora 12; you can see it on the agenda for this week's 
meeting here: 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs_Project_meetings#Thursday_Apr_30_2009_.28Wed_US_Time.29 
as "Docs decisions for F12". Release Notes are the #1 issue amongst 
these - see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs_decisions_for_F12

Cheers
Ruediger