[Mma] Re: Polish translation of octave documentation

[Boud Roukema]

hi paul, john, wszystkim,
  i'm quoting the olds mails in full since (1) we're only a small
number of users on the mma@ list, and (2) it's a long time since the
messages - people may have forgotten the content...

On Fri, 11 Apr 2003, Paul Kienzle wrote:

> boud wrote:
>
> >dear help-octave,
> >   This message is to avoid doubled-up work in translating octave
> >documentation into Polish.
> >
> >   We're some students + 1 faculty person ;) doing a course in
> >"Mathematical Methods in Astronomy" at the Nicolas Copernicus University
> >in Torun, Poland.
> >
> >  The students use their common sense and interest in astronomy to set
> >their own goals and track their progress and communicate with one another
> >using wiki technology, and the hope is to encourage usage of free software
> >(in the GPL sense) so that the knowledge and skills learnt can be easily
> >transferred to other students, or for example, high school teachers, who
> >definitely do not have the money to waste on closed software.
> >
> >We're using octave 2.1.31 as a start, since it's GPL and we've heard
> >good things about octave  :).
> >
> >Many of the students have chosen to translate a section of the octave
> >documentation into Polish as one of their goals for their course:
> >
> >http://adjani.astro.uni.torun.pl:9673/zwicky/OctaveTlumaczenie
> >
> >Two obvious questions are:
> >
> >(1) Are you aware of other people doing Polish translations of octave docs?
> >(There's no point people doubling up, even if some proofreading could be
> >useful.)
> >
> >(2) What would be the best way of submitting this for integration into
> >the octave distribution?
> >
> >
> >Please feel free to reply directly to our mailing list:
> >http://adjani.astro.uni.torun.pl/mailman/listinfo/mma
> >
> >
> I do hope you got an appropriate response already
> from John Eaton.  If not, you are always welcome

john didn't answer, but i've cc-ed him.

> to post things to octave-forge (http://octave.sf.net)
> so long as you are willing to maintain them.  I don't
> know any Polish 8-)

i don't know how active i'd be likely to be as a maintainer, and i'm
certainly not a native Polish speaker ;). But at the same time, it's
the last few weeks of the course now and though i think the meta-level
of documenting/translating software is useful for students, i think
they've done enough meta-stuff and should be able to concentrate on
*using* octave to do fun astrophysics. :)

[pl] Czy ktoś chce zostać "maintainer" dla tłumaczenie dokumentacja
octave? Oczywiście, to byłoby tylko akcja woluntarna, i ja nie wiem
jeśli byłoby dużo praca lub niedużo. Ale potrzeba być na długi termin,
myślę. Rzecz pozytywny jest że jest sposób wejść do prawdziwe
współeczeństwo internetowe - programowanie wolne - i początek tworzyć
twoja reputacja.

[en] Does anyone at TCfA want to become maintainer? Of course this
would be purely voluntary and i guess you need to be prepared to do
this over a *long* period of time.

paul, john: i'm not overly eager to become maintainer, but at the same
time i want the work done to be useful to others.

What i think i *can* do is:
(1) put together the translations that have been done and put them
into texinfo format (this seems to be the required meta-format for
documentation)

(2) upload these to http://octave.sourceforge.net/

(3) have my contact details on  http://octave.sourceforge.net/ somewhere
so that if anyone wants to improve or complete or update the Polish
translations, i can help coordinate this and try to
make sure work is not doubled up

(4) there should presumably be some system of inviting people to
double (triple) check translation quality
- this is way beyond what i have
time to do myself, but if the documentation is in structured format
(the "@" stuff with chapters and so on of texinfo seems to imply a
structured format), then there should be some way of registering
whether a translation has been checked by a 2nd person or not

but
(5) there would be no guarantee that translations are kept up to
date, though if we could wikify the texinfo versions, then if i teach
the same course next year, there might be a natural tendency for
spontaneous updates... - so there should be some sort of date/version
tag on the documentation to warn the user that it might be out-of-date.

paul, john, if (1)-(4) seem sufficient and (5) tolerable for a
maintainer, could one of you help explain to me how to do this? If
someone else later wants to replace me, of course they'd be welcome
to.


> It would be fairly easy to write a help function
> which searches a different path for the polish
> documentation on each individual function, or
> call help() if it doesn't work.  Using the polish
> word for "help" as the function name seems
> appropriate.
>
> More difficult is dealing with error messages.
> We could probably modify error.cc so that
> it looks up the messages in the locale specific
> data base using gettext.  This should handle
> most cases.  The remaining cases can be
> handled by either sending them through
> error or warning as they should be, or by
> using _("text"). You will also need a version
> of _() for use in scripts.

This stuff would be nice, but at the moment, simply having
a texinfo format and example formats in .ps and .html would
seem largely sufficient for the most likely Polish octave
users.

Replies to mma@ are OK as non-subscribers (we get a little spam,
but not much ;).

pozdrawiam
boud

> Paul Kienzle
> pkienzle at users.sf.net
>
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