This manual is a guide for the GNU Web Translators.
Last updated on
08.02.2012, for GNUnited Nations version 0.5.
Copyright © 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License.”
This manual is an attempt to describe in detail the process of translating www.gnu.org articles—how to join a team, or start a new one, the responsibilities of the team members and leaders, as well as some peculiarities of the GNU Project's website when it comes to localization.
The GNU website contains hundreds of documents, most of them philosophical articles (essays) and technical documents which need to be translated to make them available to a broader audience. This is especially important for the philosophy-related materials, as many people do not speak English and even those that do usually prefer to read such articles in their native language. Dealing with the task of translating a website this large is a hard job, and too often people volunteering as translators get frustrated or lose interest in keeping up with that work. Reading this manual, and the related GNUN manual (see GNUnited Nations), is just the tip of the iceberg. This is not meant to discourage any potential volunteer; rather, we prefer to be honest and to give preliminary estimation of the work/responsibility involved—if you feel you are not in a position to help you may move on to a smaller project before going through all procedures.
It is important to realize that being a GNU Web Translator is a hard job at all levels, but your help is much appreciated and is invaluable contribution to the society. While there are many people who contribute to our community by writing free software (and their number is constantly increasing), the ones actively engaged in teaching others to appreciate and defend their freedom are only a few. Consequently and rather unfortunately, there are not so many volunteers willing to maintain on the long term translations of the various essays that describe the fundamental values of the free software movement.
Translators of the http://gnu.org website are organized in language teams. Each team has one or more co-ordinators, who are responsible for the respective team. The co-ordinators participate in the Savannah ‘trans-coord’ organizational project, which is managed by the GNU Web Translation Managers. The manual is organized in chapters that follow the organizational structure of the whole translation project.
If you wish to join a translation team or contribute a translation or two, see Members. If your intention is to form a translation team, see Leaders. The chapter about the ‘trans-coord’ administrators (a.k.a. GNU Translation Managers) describes all the responsibilities and procedures involved in performing this duty. See Translation Managers.
Being a team member means to co-operate with a group of other people, working under the co-ordinatorship of the appointed team leader. Usually, this involves translating articles and reviewing/proof-reading other people's translations, participating in discussions about terminology issues, and sometimes performing clean-up tasks.
To join a team, please first look at the existing teams at http://www.gnu.org/server/standards/README.translations.html#TranslationsUnderway. Chances are that there is already an established team. If there is no team listed for your language, this means that:
If the team is marked as orphaned, there is no problem: you can still submit your translation to web-translators@gnu.org (see Submitting). In case you want to establish a new translation team or become a co-ordinator of an existing one, please refer to the next chapter, see Leaders.
Contacting the team is best done via Savannah—each translation team
has its own project, named ‘www-lang’, with the project
page being
<https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/www-lang>.
Usually teams have mailing lists, typically in the form
www-lang-...@gnu.org. Some teams have homepages,
<http://gnu.org/server/standards/translations/lang>
with additional contact details and procedures for team members.
You could also write directly to the team leader via the Savannah interface—that way your request will be recorded by Savannah and can be tracked or completed when the membership is approved.
The actual process of submitting translations for review varies from team to team, as teams have certain liberties to organize themselves as they see fit. Thus, this manual does not make any attempt to cover that aspect—please refer to the team-specific documentation (if any) or ask the co-ordinator.
Certainly, it is not mandatory to be an active team member to contribute a translation or two. If you feel that you don't have the time to participate actively, that is fine; you can still send your translation to the team. No contributions should be rejected.
If you do not hear from the team within a reasonable time frame (say, two weeks), please write to web-translators@gnu.org.
For general information about the translation process, see Translation Tips.
Everyone can still submit translations even if there is no translation team formed. There are two ways to do that—following the existing procedures, which is the preferred way, and sending it as plain text, which means more work for a limited group of volunteers (the Translation Managers) to convert the translation in .po format.
All translations1 are maintained via GNUN (see http://www.gnu.org/software/gnun/), which significantly eases maintenance and avoids the unpleasant situation where a translation is lagging behind the original. See Advantages.
As of September 2008 all new translations at gnu.org are installed in .po format, and the .html is generated automatically. Here are the steps to produce and submit such a translation:
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/web/www co www/gnu
This command will fetch only the /gnu directory—in other words, all articles at http://gnu.org/gnu.
TEMPLATE_LINGUAS variable at server/gnun/gnun.mk, then you
don't have to do anything. If it is not, the required files are
server/po/head-include-2.lang.po,
server/po/body-include-1.lang.po,
server/po/body-include-2.lang.po and
server/po/footer-text.lang.po—you can translate and
submit them in the usual way, together with the translation of the
essay.
Additional templates are defined via the extra-templates variable in server/gnun/gnun.mk.
If you don't want to translate the templates for whatever reason—do not worry, the web-translators will install empty templates (which means the English strings will be used).
It is quite possible that there will be errors or typos, so once you are
informed that the translation is online, check it carefully and if
necessary, resubmit the PO file with corrections. Do not forget to run
cvs update first and edit the updated .po file from the
repository—most probably the Translation Managers have already made
some modifications to it, usually to fix validation errors and to
complete the PO file header.
If you feel the procedure described in the previous section is too burdensome and unfeasible for you to follow, you can still submit a translation in plain text. It will be manually converted to PO file by the GNU Web Translation Managers, which can be tricky sometimes, and naturally, means more work for them and slower processing of your request.
You should never translate the HTML markup—i.e. do not use the “View Source” functionality of your browser to translate the raw HTML. Most of it is irrelevant, and automatically inherited from the markup of the original article. Simply save your translation in a plain text file (.txt), preferably in UTF-8 encoding. You can use any decent text editor for that—Emacs, Vim, gEdit, Kate, OpenOffice.org (the file should be saved as .txt, not .odt), etc.
Translate the title, the blue heading (if it differs slightly from the title) and the body of the article upto the link ‘back to top’. For example, for http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html that would be:
The Free Software Definition - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)
We maintain this free software definition...
...
...If you would like to review the complete list of changes, you can
do so on our cvsweb interface.
Since web-translators do not speak all languages, it is essential to
mark somehow any inner markup, because very often it is hard to figure
out what translated text should be enclosed inside <em> or
<a> elements, to name a few. The easiest way to do this is just
to use the corresponding HTML markup, although anything else is
suitable. For example, here is how to indicate that the link “History
section” at the first paragraph of the same article should correspond
to “sección historial” in the translation:
Si quisiera revisar los cambios que hemos hecho, por favor vea la
{sección historial} más abajo para más información.
It is not necessary to include the value of the href attribute,
as it is already known.
If you wish your name to appear in the footer as a translator of the article, please also provide a translation of ‘Translation: your name in your native language’ or ‘Translated by: your name in your native language’, as you prefer. Please also state if you wish your email address to be published (some readers prefer to send suggestions directly to the translator, but we certainly do not require that translators must publish their address).
Finally, send the translation to web-translators@gnu.org, either inline or as an attachment to your message. Once online, please check for any errors or omissions that may have resulted from the conversion process, and report them back.
When you realize that you don't have time or can't devote sufficient resources to perform the tasks anymore, it is prudent to inform the translation team co-ordinator and possibly all the rest of the team-mates. The team leader should always have a rough estimation about the available translators, even though there are no reliable means to establish that. Your announcement that you are stepping down (temporarily or permanently) may help her in this regard.
A gnu.org translation team leader is the person who is ultimately responsible for organizing and managing the team, including, but not limited to, having the final say on contributed translations and exercising levels of control as she sees fit.
A prospective team co-ordinator should have perfect understanding of the GNU Philosophy and the various issues the free software movement set out to solve. Energy and time are always needed, as well as certain communication skills.
However, a team leader is not a dictator (for life); every action and/or decision taken should have its justification and should stem from the goals of the project at large. Inefficient or inoperative leaders are replaced, if necessary.
Establishing a new team is not hard, but a certain procedure ought to be followed. The most important thing to realize is that this is somewhat a long-term engagement that requires a lot of spare time, communication and technical skills, and devotion. The only “bonus” team leaders have is more work and more responsibilities.
You should read most of the philosophy-related articles and all the documentation related to the translation process before you decide to form a new team, or take over an orphaned team. Once you have the internal feeling that having a gnu.org translation team for your language is a must, and you are the one for this job, follow these steps:
Examine the layout and structure of the repository. Basically, it is mapped to the URL locations, more or less. Take a look at the most important materials to translate under /philosophy, /gnu, /distros, /copyleft and /licenses directories just to get a rough estimate about the amount of work involved. If you are still not scared and determined to go on further, excellent.
As you have probably observed, every directory that contains translatable articles has a /po sub-directory, which is where the new canonical source format of the translations is stored.
TEMPLATE_LINGUAS at
server/gnun/gnun.mk. If it is not, the first thing to do is to
translate and submit to web-translators@gnu.org the following
files (all in the server/po/ directory):
head-include-2.lang.po,
body-include-1.lang.po, body-include-2.lang.po
and footer-text.lang.po, together with your first message
stating that you would like to establish a new team. See New Translation.
find -name \*.lang.html
Pay attention: This step is a formality. You should proceed with the project registration only when you have been asked by web-translators@gnu.org to do so. Otherwise, the submission may appear in the task list of the Savannah Hackers for a fairly long time, which is troublesome.
You'll have to request subscription to ‘www-discuss’ yourself—this list is managed by the GNU Webmasters, but all team leaders are required to subscribe in order to receive important site-wide announcements.
The whole process should not take more than two weeks or maximum a month—if this period turns out to be longer, it is an indication that you do not have the required time and resources for this job, or web-translators are badly lagging behind and do not process the requests with the expected pace.
Applications for new teams are sometimes processed in parallel2—the most suitable candidate is chosen in this case. This is, undoubtedly, based on a subjective judgment made by the Translation Managers, and many factors are important.
The procedure for taking over an orphaned team is the same. Once completed, you will be made an admin of the respective ‘www-lang’ Savannah project, or if it doesn't exist, invited to apply for registration. Do not automatically remove old members just because you are starting “afresh”—some of them might want to continue to contribute. Contact them privately, explaining that you're the new appointed team co-ordinator, and ask them if they would be willing to continue their involvement in the team.
It is not our ambition to describe all activities involved in managing a team—it's very likely that you will encounter new problems, take care of tasks nobody else is aware of, or invent new techniques and approaches in your quest to keep things running. Managing a team is a hard task on all counts: communication with others, recruiting volunteers (and keeping them as long as possible), defending certain decisions, leading discussions about terminology issues, handling personal conflicts within the team, technical skills when reviewing/merging/syncing translations, etc. The list goes on and on.
This manual can only summarize some of the most common issues and suggest ways to deal with them. It is up to the team leader to establish the precise team procedures and practices.
The trans-coord-discuss@gnu.org mailing list was specifically created to discuss issues that leaders encounter while managing the teams, and for general organizational work. Feel free to discuss anything related to the translation process there.
First and foremost, find at least one person for peer review. You will review her translations, and she will review yours (at least in the beginning). Being a team leader does not mean that you cannot make mistakes; everyone does. The mutual review (especially if done by a larger group) is crucial for the quality of the translation process. Too many errors are just missed (especially if they are obvious) when the translator does a final review of her own translation.
It is good to establish a practice: Do not commit officially (i.e. in ‘www’, which will appear online at http://gnu.org immediately) a translation that is not yet reviewed by someone else who is not the translator. Always perform a final review yourself even if the translation has been checked by another member of the team. In other words, every translation installed at gnu.org should pass through your hands (read: eyes).
One common technique for performing such reviews is to use a mailing list—the translator sends the new translation and participants comment on specific parts, quoting them appropriately. The benefit of this approach is that it is straightforward, but the drawback is that there is no automatic “record” about the conclusion of the specific discussion (or sub-thread) and sometimes such discussions easily digress, making it even harder to come up with a solution.
Another way is to use Savannah's built-in trackers (the ‘Tasks’ and ‘Bugs’ trackers, specifically). This is further explained in the next section, see Tracking Tasks. One way or another, you should create some kind of review process.
The team leader has to make sure that prospective translations are reviewed, that they do not contain obvious errors and/or confusing expressions and that they match the spirit and intention of the original essay. However, many teams tend to suffer from a specific problem: team members rely on the leader to make these extensive reviews. That is fine, as far as it goes, and the leader should always review translations before installing them in the repository—but it is nearly impossible (especially for a large team) to rely on a single person for such tasks. Team co-ordinators often do not manage to make such reviews in time, resulting in frustration among the team members and generally slowing the translation process.
A solution to this specific problem is to distribute the load among more people. For example: Member D makes a translation of foo.html and uploads foo.lang.po in the translation project's repository at Savannah, marking the relevant task as “Ready for Test” (of course, the equivalent is sending a message with the attached translation to the team's mailing list, or similar). Then Member A, B and C (or only A and B if C is currently busy) review it independently and post comments/suggestions/errors in the bug tracker. Discussion goes on between them and D, problems are rectified and finally the leader (who may happen to be one of A, B, C, D) makes a final review. It is easier to make the final review when most of the issues are already fixed in previous revisions. Finally, the translation is published. The result is better quality of the translation (since more people looked at it) and the whole burden does not fall solely on the shoulders of the leader. You can also set up an internal formal rule: If a member makes a translation, he has to review another one (or two) as well.
Some translations can take a fairly long time—the typical example is a complicated essay or a transcript of a speech. It is best to avoid duplicate work by indicating, or better—recording, that someone is working on this specific article. The ‘Tasks’ tracker is suitable for this purpose.
It is prudent to discuss the most convenient naming scheme and practice among team members, and publish the convention and/or rules at the team's homepage. Note that you can create Custom Fields in the trackers, and resolved bugs can be searched based on these custom values.
Thus, a possible straightforward way to manage these tasks is:
Of course, teams can choose to manage these things using external resources and eventually other bug (or issue) tracking systems. Whatever you decide, please make sure that bugs can be reported using free software only, and that the software providing that service is free. It makes an extremely bad impression if a reader has to report a problem about a gnu.org translation via non-free hosting platforms like SourceForge.
If you use a certain facility (i.e. a bug tracking system) to manage bugs in translations, it is best to take advantage of generic.lang.html and advertise it on every page. See generic.LANG.html, for details.
Sometimes a translation (typically your own) is not reviewed by anyone else for a fairly long time. This is unfortunate, but there is no reason to keep it in draft state forever. If nobody reviewed it for a substantially long period (like 3 or 4 months), commit it as it is. Readers may report bugs as well (and they do!).
It is important to record somehow that this published translation still lacks appropriate review. If the suggestion in the previous section is implemented, it would mean leaving the relevant task ‘Open’ and ‘Ready For Test’ despite the translation being officially online. You may also add a comment to the PO file.
As all team leaders have write access to the CVS repository of the ‘www’ project, this technically means that they are able to modify every single file in it, and also those of the Web CVS repositories of other projects at Savannah. This vote of confidence should never be abused—the only files team co-ordinators should add/update are those relevant to their translation work. It is OK to fix an obvious typo in an original article; for anything else please report to webmasters@gnu.org.
If you wish to volunteer as webmaster and help with generic webmaster work and RT tickets, that is perfectly fine—please follow the established (by the GNU Webmasters) procedure. If you are approved, you can modify such pages wearing your “webmaster's hat”.
If a particular page has issues with the markup which create problems for your language, please inform trans-coord-discuss@gnu.org. For general issues that affect more articles, or for severe problems, please write to www-discuss@gnu.org.
It is recommended to read the entire CVS manual at least once, for a basic understanding of how this VCS works. See Concurrent Versions System. It is not necessary to become an expert—the ‘www’ project does not use complex features like tags, vendor branches, merging, etc. as they are not very useful for a live website.
However, you'd probably have to learn how to use CVS for effective work—to extract information from the history, review diffs and specific changes, synchronize with the working repository of the team (if any), adding/removing files, etc.
If you make changes that affect more than one file but the change is coherent, please do it as a single commit. This will generate only one message to www-commits@gnu.org, which is better than 5 messages for 5 files about semantically the same change. Always write commit logs in English3, providing a short description of the change. If you modify a file that is not an article but a script or part of software (such as server/gnun/gnun.mk), it would be nice to follow the GNU Coding Standards and describe the change precisely. For example, do not write:
Added support for Nepali.
or
Yay! First commit of the Panjabi homepage!
Instead, write the log as follows:
(TEMPLATE_LINGUAS): Add `ne'.
and
(HOME_LINGUAS): Add `pa'.
This makes it easier for others to search for a particular change in the history.
If you add a binary file (for example, .png), do it with
cvs commit -kb file. This turns off keyword substitution,
which prevents RCS keywords like ‘$Id$’ to get expanded,
subsequently corrupting the file. See Substitution Modes. More importantly, using -kb
prevents corruption of the binary when people using CVS clients under
Windoze checkout, modify the file, and then commit it with messed EOLs.
(Unfortunately there are still committers using non-free operating
systems—we cannot dictate what OS people use, but we can at least try
to prevent damage.)
Although not absolutely compulsory, it is recommended that every team leader subscribes to www-commits@gnu.org. It is useful to examine the diffs of your own messages, if you miss something while inspecting the diff before the commit. In any case, a team leader should be subscribed to that list to avoid his own commit messages to be moderated. If you absolutely do not desire receiving all traffic, just disable mail delivery in Mailman's user interface.
Every translation team should have a project in Savannah. There are some teams that use their own resources outside from Savannah; although there's no obligation to use Savannah for team work, the need for a Savannah project for each language is obvious: it's a standard way to find information for translation teams and their contacts.
Using external hosting facilities may seem justified sometimes. Some teams may have already established repositories and/or bug tracking systems where usual contributors already have access. Some team members prefer to work within the established infrastructure of a broad translation team (for whatever reason), but this is discouraged. It is required that every team has a mailing list at Savannah (see Savannah Mailing Lists), because it is easier to pass its management to the new co-ordinator when the old one steps down, and it helps to keep the archives at one place for future members of the team. Likewise, it is better to use Savannah for the team's repository and bugs/tasks, but this is not mandatory.
However, it is important to remember that regardless of the technical resources which a team decides to use, the responsibility of the team co-ordinator remains the same.
Those teams that are using Savannah have a broad variety of tools at hand: team membership management, documents, trackers (bugs, tasks and support), alerts, CVS (and any other VCS that Savannah supports), home pages, etc. How each team uses these resources is up to the team itself, but it often turns out to choose Savannah for nearly all of the team activities, as it requires almost zero work; the Savannah Hackers are happy to support us.
Whatever you (in your capacity as a team leader) decide, please do it with caution: some organizational decisions may become ineffective as time goes by, and some may not scale well when the team grows. If the team is young and has a couple of members, it is better to refrain from such decision and discuss them with all the members when their number grows. Two or three people do not need a rocket platform or complex wizardry to do their work.
The next sections contain suggestions about how a team can use the facilities provided by Savannah. It is not mandatory to follow them, they are just suggestions.
You should add active translators as members of the translation team, and remove them when they leave. Team members should have access to all of the project's resources, and tracking their number is one of the ways for web-translators to determine the status of the team.
It is OK if a particular contributor wants to translate an article or two and does not want to be engaged with the team on a long-term basis. In such situations, there is no need to add her as a member.
It is a good idea to mark inactive members, for example if there is no interaction (bug reports, new translations, updates to existing translations, proof-reading) for at least six months. You can do that by unmarking the ‘On Duty’ checkbox for the respective project member under ‘Set Permissions’. Inactive members have absolutely the same rights as active ones—the only exception is that they don't count for the total number of members, and they appear separately on ‘View Members’.
Every Savannah project has a Web repository, which is, for technical and
historical reasons, only CVS. By default it is mapped to
<http://www.gnu.org/server/standards/translations/lang>;
to add files to it first make a checkout, following the instructions at
<https://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=www-lang>.
It is recommended to describe all team-specific procedures, if there are any. That way, you can point potential team members to the corresponding page containing these instructions, instead of repeatedly explaining every volunteer separately.
All team-specific pages should follow the usual linking criteria (see http://gnu.org/server/standards/README.webmastering.html#pollinking and the FSF HTML Style Sheet Guidelines—http://gnu.org/server/fsf-html-style-sheet.html).
For historical reasons, team-specific materials were available in the ‘www’ repository, under ad-hoc locations as /spanish, /wwwsr, etc. These locations are deprecated, and the contents will be moved without warning to /graveyard in the ‘trans-coord’ Sources repository, following the original ‘www’ layout (that is, if there were any sub-directories, they will be retained).
This tracker is supposed to be related to things about the project management itself, i.e. project members may report here missing functionality and/or features that requires the project admin(s)'s action. Do not use it for anything else as it quickly becomes confusing. It is OK to disable it if the team is small.
This is a way to manage all sorts of tasks. They appear in the personal Savannah page of the assignee, so it is difficult to miss them out. It is possible to use this tracker to “announce” to the team members that a specific article should be translated. The one who volunteers may assign the task to herself.
Teams may use this tracker to avoid duplicate work, by declaring that they intend to work on a specific translation.
Feel free to organize the ‘Tasks’ management as you see fit.
The ‘Bugs’ tracker is designed for tracking bugs. You can use for several purposes:
This tracker doesn't make much sense for translation projects, as the original on which the translation is based is volatile and the translation patch is 100% guaranteed not to apply cleanly very soon after it is submitted. Even ignoring this detail, this specific feature is slowly marching towards complete deprecation, as there are much better ways to submit patches nowadays.
You should disable this feature, as it causes only confusion.
That is a way to inform newcomers and interested people (who visit the project page from time to time, or subscribe to the ‘News’ RSS feed) about a major change or event within the project.
You can also setup news entries to be sent to a mailing list (that's possible for the other trackers as well).
The purpose of this feature is informational—if members need to know about an important change (in practices, procedures, etc.), it is perfectly OK to announce it here. Some teams use it to announce new translations, which is also fine.
Every team should have a mailing list on lists.gnu.org and use it for internal communications. All active translators should be on the list. The list owner should be the co-ordinator of the team. The name of the list should begin with ‘www-lang-’.
The list will make it possible for the GNU project to contact the team when the co-ordinator disappears; its archive will also give access to the history for new translators.
You can create new mailing lists via the Savannah interface. However, this should be done after some thought. If the project membership is low (<= 10 members), there is no need to create more than one mailing list.
You can redirect all messages generated by the trackers to any list.
An easy way to keep up with changes in the original articles and to manage continuous contributions is to keep all translations in the translation project's Sources repository. That way, it is easy to edit draft translations and install them in ‘www’ only when they're ready. It is also convenient to update the translation (merge any changes from the original) while it is still under review.
See PO Files and Team, for more information.
Remember: A choice of a particular VCS is a sensitive matter—some modern ones provide compelling features, but they also bump the barrier for participation higher. The VCS is supposed to ease collaborative maintenance—if it eases only you, project members just won't use so that won't be a net win.
An alternative way to maintain translations is to use one of the existing online editors. There are plans to install a web-based system for managing .po files at Savannah, including online editing and statistics. Until it happens, teams who wish to use this functionality may setup such a server on a host of their own, or use one of the existing free hosting platforms such as Launchpad (http://translations.launchpad.net).
Here is a short and probably incomplete list of such systems:
If you decide to use such a system, please make sure that no translations are published in HTML format there.
Note that to keep the .pot files regularly updated (assuming such a web-based system runs msgmerge automatically), you'll have to take care of the one-way regular sync from the ‘www’ CVS repository.
When the team grows large and it becomes hard for a single person to manage, there is no problem to add another (or even another two) people to help. Note that a subsequently appointed team co-ordinator is not simply a committer with write access to the ‘www’ repository; she has full responsibilities just like a single leader, although the latter still remains the primary contact for the team.
If you'd like another person to act as a co-leader and help you with the management tasks, send a message to web-translators@gnu.org with her name and Savannah account. She has to be already a member of ‘www-lang’.
The procedure for co-leaders is a simplified version of the one for a new team or taking over an existing team. See New Team.
To remove co-ordinators, please write to web-translators@gnu.org with details and rationale for the removal. Do not edit README.translations.html yourself; this is a final formality step to be performed by the Translation Managers.
Team leaders must send an annual report about the status of the team. A good report should include:
The best time to send a report is near the end of the year, for example November. In any case, please do not send it later than December 15th, as the Translation Manager has to prepare a general report to the FSF, and it is better if it takes into account the reports of the team leaders.
If there is no sensitive information in the report and you feel like sharing it, you can send it to trans-coord-discuss@gnu.org (which is still a private mailing list). That way, other list readers may help with suggestions how to solve a particular issue. Informing each other about the progress improves the community spirit.
If you do not wish to share some information that is in the report, please send it to web-translators@gnu.org.
When you feel you don't have the energy to manage the team successfully, or perhaps you start losing motivation, please inform web-translators@gnu.org. It would be substantially easier if you try to find a replacement or recommend a specific person—we will try to find someone in any case, but your judgment is important and it will be considered with priority.
An excellent way to step down is to do it with a “plan”—suggest the person you consider capable of doing the job as co-leader (see Co-leaders) and retire completely when she is absolutely ready to proceed without your further help and advice.
This chapter is not yet written. The current admins know what to do, hopefully.
The purpose of this chapter is to summarize some odd and not so obvious details about specific parts of the gnu.org website. Most of them become well known as time goes by; however, practice shows that it is difficult to figure them out at once.
Some limitations and oddities are just historical remnants from old habits and previous incarnations of old (inefficient) translation and webmastering processes. Others are outright deficiencies (i.e. “bugs”), but no one has stepped in to correct them so far.
Migration to the new style should be straightforward, and this is one of the problems GNUN set out to solve. If you have to migrate old-style translations, see Migrating. If the old translation is HTML 2.0 (or 3.2), you still have to take care about the inner markup. Overall, it is substantially easier than doing all of it manually.
Subsequent migrations to newer HTML standards and newer look and feel of the website are supposed to happen semi-automatically, although this manual will be updated as needed.
#includesThe GNU Project's website uses SSI (Server Side Includes) to manage some
common parts that are the same in many of the articles. With the help
of GNUN their handling should be behind the scenes, but for some of them
manual intervention is needed. Here is a (possibly incomplete) list of
the #include's used:
#include directives, so the
“translation” should be identical, with filenames modified to have the
lang extension.
xml:lang and lang attributes, and for RTL
languages, the dir attribute. For example, the file
header.ar.html should contain this line:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="ar" lang="ar"
dir="rtl">
<meta> element at
server/head-include-1.lang.html, so browsers will obey it.
The encoding should be UTF-8. This is required because the English text
in the articles serves as a replacement of the translation when the latter
is not complete, and because all translated pages share automatically
generated lists of translations.
#include directive. It is maintained
manually, so just add lang to the filename, in order the localized
footer-text.lang.html to be included.
The files
in the server sub-directory are what webmasters call “the
server templates”. These files are included in almost every article,
translated or not. They are somewhat important, as an error made in
translating them propagates everywhere. The server templates, the
homepages, and whatsnew (a.k.a. “GNU News”) are being rebuilt by
GNUN whenever there is a change in the original English files; the
GRACE variable has no effect for them. See Runtime Variables.
The file style.css gets included in almost all the English articles. It includes two other files, which form the actual CSS style used. However, this style is seldom right for translations—many languages have much longer expressions, and that is natural. To include your own CSS, create a file style.lang.css and add it after the original style.css in your server/po/head-include-2.lang.po, i.e.
# type: style
msgid "@import url('/style.css');"
msgstr ""
"@import url('/style.css');\n"
"@import url('/style.bg.css');"
Override only what is necessary and looks broken in your language; do not invent your own style. This is important for the consistency of the gnu.org website. A typical language-specific style.lang.css file looks like this:
.inner { max-width: 65em; }
#logo{background:url(/graphics/topbanner.bg.png) no-repeat;}
#fssbox {font-size: 50%;}
This widens the menu and the area where the articles are displayed (because the menu entries are much longer than the English equivalents when translated), includes a localized logo, and makes the font size for the FSF widget twice smaller (because in this language, the translations are almost twice longer and displayed truncated, which is undesirable).
When creating your own style.lang.css, don't forget to include the license notice from the style.css, with a short comment.
If using the default CSS style for translations does not give the expected good results, or there are other problems (significant or not) that obstruct reading and/or worsen the look from aesthetic point of view, please write to webmasters@gnu.org with a description of the issue. If there are several unrelated problems, send separate messages with appropriate explanation (which may include a demonstration of the bug, such as a screenshot).
If you'd like the nice gnu image to be localized (i.e. “GNU Operating System” to appear in your native language, here are the steps:
cvs add the files4.
#logo{background:url(/graphics/topbanner.lang.png) no-repeat;}
If you feel uncomfortable manipulating images—don't despair! Send a plea for help to trans-coord-discuss@gnu.org, some people would be happy to help you. Failing that, write to www-discuss@gnu.org.
Unfortunately, the http://gnu.org website does not have excellent support for RTL (right-to-left) languages, although best efforts are made. If your language is in this category, make sure to:
dir="rtl" in the html element at
server/header.lang.html.
Important: Some articles contain their own <style>
redefinitions, or style attributes in the form <p
style="...">. In such situations, it is quite possible that the
general language-specific CSS does not help, and the translation of this
specific article does not look correct. Please write to
webmasters@gnu.org; if you have a working solution that works
for both cases—so much the better. For general issues that affect
your language and require a general solution, write to
webmasters@gnu.org as well, precisely describing the problem.
The article http://www.gnu.org/server/standards/translations/priorities.html lists the most important essays to translate. In general, articles in the directories philosophy, gnu, distros, copyleft and licenses are important. The others may be deferred for a time when a team completes most of the important translations, or they can be translated as a “rest”–in translators' parlance this means doing something in between which is typically easier to handle.
It is very important to keep existing translations up-to-date with the
respective English originals. This task should be higher priority than
translating new articles. GNUN's report rule can help you to
identify precisely which articles need updating; see report. There is a monthly cronjob which
sends a verbose output to each team—by default, the address(es) used
is the Savannah account(s) of the admin(s) of the specific translation
project. If you want them changed, please write to
web-translators@gnu.org.
It is strongly recommended translation teams to attempt to recruit native English speakers in order to improve their translation process. Translators sometimes misunderstand English idioms and expressions, and as a result, they translate them incorrectly or in ways that are suboptimal and confusing. These errors are trivial to discover for the native English speaker.
Do not translate articles under these directories:
The English language has some rules for capitalization of titles, chapters, acronym expansions and the like. These rules are neither strict nor uniform, although the gnu.org website strives to apply them consistently. They do not make sense for many other languages, but unfortunately, many translators erroneously duplicate the capitalization in their translation.
Examples for common (and correct) English capitalization is the title of the article “Why Software Should Be Free” or “Free Software Foundation” (FSF). However, in languages that do not have such grammar rules it is wrong to write “Dlaczego Oprogramowanie Powinno By´c Wolne” (Polish) or “Fondation Pour Le Logiciel Libre” (French).
Another prominent and widely spread mistake is to write your own
language with a capital letter in the translations-list when
languages are written beginning with a small letter according to your
own rules. In other words, it is right to write ‘English’ or
‘Deutsch’ (because in English and German languages are
capitalized), but not ‘Français’ or ‘Português’—write
them as ‘français’ or ‘português’, respectively.
Most www.gnu.org articles are released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States license. The exact HTML for English pages to use is:
This page is licensed under a <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/us/">Creative
Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License</a>.
Pages in other languages should translate this notice, and should link to a translated version of the Creative Commons license “deed” if it's available. Creative Commons provides standard text for this in all the languages they support, and we should use that wording whenever possible. To do that, follow these steps:
For example, here's the text they provide for German:
Dieses Werk bzw. Inhalt steht unter einer <a rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/us/deed.de">Creative
Commons Namensnennung-Keine Bearbeitung 3.0 Vereinigte Staaten von
Amerika Lizenz</a>.
Note that the link in this text is changed to point directly to the German language deed. We should always link to a copy of the license deed that's in the same language as the page itself.
Pages in languages that aren't supported by CC should prepare their own translation, use it consistently throughout pages translated to that language, and link to the English language deed.
Note that translations should not change the jurisdiction of the license; they should always link to the CC BY-ND 3.0 United States license, and not a different port like CC BY-ND 3.0 Japan. This is because there are substantive differences between the way different ports handle moral rights issues, and we prefer the specific terms that are in the United States license.
This is a very important topic, not yet covered by this manual.
In general, it is expected that all participants in the translation process apply common sense for all of the decisions (important or not) they are going to take in their capacity as a manager, team leader, or contributing member. Certainly, many decisions are not easy, and require some thought.
This manual is a work in progress—it is not set in stone, and it will never be finished—the ultimate goal is to constantly improve the translation process, and as a consequence, the documentation. Every participant in the process should be free to suggest modifications to the current procedures and suggestions how to improve the current state of affairs. Ideally, they should be accompanied with patches to the Texinfo source, but that's not mandatory. In any event, please write to trans-coord-discuss@gnu.org—the goal of this list is precisely to discuss improvements of the translation process.
Here is a short summary of the mailing lists relevant to the translation process, and a brief description about how they relate to the various participants in the process.
This is a private mailing list.
This is a public mailing list, so everyone can subscribe and review the
archives. The ‘www’ CVS repository is also public.
This is a private mailing list, although there is no absolute reason for
that. It may become public in the future.
Automatic announcements for new gnu.org translations (provided they're handled by GNUN) are also delivered here. There are separate ‘lang-ann’ topics for every GNUN-aware language, so it is a good idea to advertise this capability widely among your local community. For example, if a reader wants to be informed only about new Spanish translations, she can just subscribe to the ‘es-ann’ mailing list topic.
This is a public mailing list.
This is a public list, and bug-gnun@gnu.org is an alias.
This is a public list.
Participants in the www.gnu.org translations process normally have to be members of the following Savannah projects, depending on the case:
Note that this project has no direct relationship with translators,
although anything happening in ‘www’ directly affects them. The
‘www’ project is managed separately and has a different (entirely
unrelated) process for approving contributors.
The admins of this project are the GNU Web Translation Managers.
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The “Invariant Sections” are certain Secondary Sections whose titles are designated, as being those of Invariant Sections, in the notice that says that the Document is released under this License. If a section does not fit the above definition of Secondary then it is not allowed to be designated as Invariant. The Document may contain zero Invariant Sections. If the Document does not identify any Invariant Sections then there are none.
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You may make a collection consisting of the Document and other documents released under this License, and replace the individual copies of this License in the various documents with a single copy that is included in the collection, provided that you follow the rules of this License for verbatim copying of each of the documents in all other respects.
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If the Cover Text requirement of section 3 is applicable to these copies of the Document, then if the Document is less than one half of the entire aggregate, the Document's Cover Texts may be placed on covers that bracket the Document within the aggregate, or the electronic equivalent of covers if the Document is in electronic form. Otherwise they must appear on printed covers that bracket the whole aggregate.
Translation is considered a kind of modification, so you may distribute translations of the Document under the terms of section 4. Replacing Invariant Sections with translations requires special permission from their copyright holders, but you may include translations of some or all Invariant Sections in addition to the original versions of these Invariant Sections. You may include a translation of this License, and all the license notices in the Document, and any Warranty Disclaimers, provided that you also include the original English version of this License and the original versions of those notices and disclaimers. In case of a disagreement between the translation and the original version of this License or a notice or disclaimer, the original version will prevail.
If a section in the Document is Entitled “Acknowledgements”, “Dedications”, or “History”, the requirement (section 4) to Preserve its Title (section 1) will typically require changing the actual title.
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However, if you cease all violation of this License, then your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated (a) provisionally, unless and until the copyright holder explicitly and finally terminates your license, and (b) permanently, if the copyright holder fails to notify you of the violation by some reasonable means prior to 60 days after the cessation.
Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice.
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“Incorporate” means to publish or republish a Document, in whole or in part, as part of another Document.
An MMC is “eligible for relicensing” if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008.
The operator of an MMC Site may republish an MMC contained in the site under CC-BY-SA on the same site at any time before August 1, 2009, provided the MMC is eligible for relicensing.
To use this License in a document you have written, include a copy of the License in the document and put the following copyright and license notices just after the title page:
Copyright (C) year your name.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3
or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover
Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled ``GNU
Free Documentation License''.
If you have Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts and Back-Cover Texts, replace the “with...Texts.” line with this:
with the Invariant Sections being list their titles, with
the Front-Cover Texts being list, and with the Back-Cover Texts
being list.
If you have Invariant Sections without Cover Texts, or some other combination of the three, merge those two alternatives to suit the situation.
If your document contains nontrivial examples of program code, we recommend releasing these examples in parallel under your choice of free software license, such as the GNU General Public License, to permit their use in free software.
[1] Well—not really, but the goal is to maintain all of them.
[2] In general, we try to avoid this and direct all new volunteers to the person who is already carrying out the process—this is also a verification if she can cooperate easily with others.
[3] This advice is applicable for the ‘www’ repository only—feel free to write logs in your native language when committing in your project's Sources repository.
[4] This advice applies to all new files, of course.