Chapter 9 Translations

More and more people are approaching the freebsd-doc mailing list and volunteering to translate FreeBSD documentation to other languages. This FAQ aims to answer their questions so they can start translating documentation as quickly as possible.

i18n means internationalization and l10n means localization. They are just a convenient shorthand.

i18n can be read as “i” followed by 18 letters, followed by “n”. Similarly, l10n is “l” followed by 10 letters, followed by “n”.

Yes. Different translation groups have their own mailing lists. The list of translation projects has more information about the mailing lists and web sites run by each translation project.

Yes. The more people work on translation the faster it gets done, and the faster changes to the English documentation are mirrored in the translated documents.

You do not have to be a professional translator to be able to help.

Ideally, you will have a good knowledge of written English, and obviously you will need to be fluent in the language you are translating to.

English is not strictly necessary. For example, you could do a Hungarian translation of the FAQ from the Spanish translation.

It is strongly recommended that you maintain a local copy of the FreeBSD CVS repository (at least the documentation part) either using CTM or CVSup. The "Staying current with FreeBSD" chapter in the Handbook explains how to use these applications.

You should be comfortable using CVS. This will allow you to see what has changed between different versions of the files that make up the documentation.

[XXX To Do -- write a tutorial that shows how to use CVSup to get just the documentation, check it out, and see what has changed between two arbitrary revisions]

The Documentation Project translations page lists the translation efforts that are currently known about. If others are already working on translating documentation to your language, please do not duplicate their efforts. Instead, contact them to see how you can help.

If no one is listed on that page as translating for your language, then send a message to the FreeBSD documentation project mailing list in case someone else is thinking of doing a translation, but has not announced it yet.

Congratulations, you have just started the “FreeBSD your-language-here Documentation Translation Project”. Welcome aboard.

First, decide whether or not you have got the time to spare. Since you are the only person working on your language at the moment it is going to be your responsibility to publicize your work and coordinate any volunteers that might want to help you.

Write an email to the Documentation Project mailing list, announcing that you are going to translate the documentation, so the Documentation Project translations page can be maintained.

If there is already someone in your country providing FreeBSD mirroring services you should contact them and ask if you can have some webspace for your project, and possibly an email address or mailing list services.

Then pick a document and start translating. It is best to start with something fairly small--either the FAQ, or one of the tutorials.

That depends. If you are already working with a translation team (such as the Japanese team, or the German team) then they will have their own procedures for handling submitted documentation, and these will be outlined on their web pages.

If you are the only person working on a particular language (or you are responsible for a translation project and want to submit your changes back to the FreeBSD project) then you should send your translation to the FreeBSD project (see the next question).

First, make sure your translation is organized properly. This means that it should drop into the existing documentation tree and build straight away.

Currently, the FreeBSD documentation is stored in a top level directory called doc/. Directories below this are named according to the language code they are written in, as defined in ISO639 (/usr/share/misc/iso639 on a version of FreeBSD newer than 20th January 1999).

If your language can be encoded in different ways (for example, Chinese) then there should be directories below this, one for each encoding format you have provided.

Finally, you should have directories for each document.

For example, a hypothetical Swedish translation might look like:

doc/
    sv_SE.ISO8859-1/
                     Makefile 
                     books/
                           faq/
                               Makefile
                               book.sgml

sv_SE.ISO8859-1 is the name of the translation, in lang.encoding form. Note the two Makefiles, which will be used to build the documentation.

Use tar(1) and gzip(1) to compress up your documentation, and send it to the project.

% cd doc
% tar cf swedish-docs.tar sv_SE.ISO8859-1
% gzip -9 swedish-docs.tar

Put swedish-docs.tar.gz somewhere. If you do not have access to your own webspace (perhaps your ISP does not let you have any) then you can email Documentation Engineering Team <doceng@FreeBSD.org>, and arrange to email the files when it is convenient.

Either way, you should use send-pr(1) to submit a report indicating that you have submitted the documentation. It would be very helpful if you could get other people to look over your translation and double check it first, since it is unlikely that the person committing it will be fluent in the language.

Someone (probably the Documentation Project Manager, currently Documentation Engineering Team <doceng@FreeBSD.org>) will then take your translation and confirm that it builds. In particular, the following things will be looked at:

1. Do all your files use RCS strings (such as "ID")?

2. Does make all in the sv_SE.ISO8859-1 directory work correctly?

3. Does make install work correctly?

If there are any problems then whoever is looking at the submission will get back to you to work them out.

If there are no problems your translation will be committed as soon as possible.

We would prefer that you did not.

For example, suppose that you are translating the Handbook to Korean, and want to include a section about retailers in Korea in your Handbook.

There is no real reason why that information should not be in the English (or German, or Spanish, or Japanese, or ...) versions as well. It is feasible that an English speaker in Korea might try to pick up a copy of FreeBSD whilst over there. It also helps increase FreeBSD's perceived presence around the globe, which is not a bad thing.

If you have country specific information, please submit it as a change to the English Handbook (using send-pr(1)) and then translate the change back to your language in the translated Handbook.

Thanks.

Non-ASCII characters in the documentation should be included using SGML entities.

Briefly, these look like an ampersand (&), the name of the entity, and a semi-colon (;).

The entity names are defined in ISO8879, which is in the ports tree as textproc/iso8879.

A few examples include:

Entity: é

Appearance: é

Description: Small “e” with an acute accent

Entity: É

Appearance: É

Description: Large “E” with an acute accent

Entity: ü

Appearance: ü

Description: Small “u” with an umlaut

After you have installed the iso8879 port, the files in /usr/local/share/sgml/iso8879 contain the complete list.

In the English documents, the reader is addressed as “you”, there is no formal/informal distinction as there is in some languages.

If you are translating to a language which does distinguish, use whichever form is typically used in other technical documentation in your language. If in doubt, use a mildly polite form.

Yes.

The header of the English version of each document will look something like this:

<!--
     The FreeBSD Documentation Project

     $FreeBSD: doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/translations/chapter.sgml,v 1.5 2000/07/07 18:38:38 dannyboy Exp $
-->

The exact boilerplate may change, but it will always include a $FreeBSD$ line and the phrase The FreeBSD Documentation Project. Note that the $FreeBSD part is expanded automatically by CVS, so it should be empty (just $FreeBSD$) for new files.

Your translated documents should include their own $FreeBSD$ line, and change the FreeBSD Documentation Project line to The FreeBSD language Documentation Project.

In addition, you should add a third line which indicates which revision of the English text this is based on.

So, the Spanish version of this file might start:

<!--
     The FreeBSD Spanish Documentation Project

     $FreeBSD: doc/es_ES.ISO8859-1/books/fdp-primer/translations/chapter.sgml,v 1.3 1999/06/24 19:12:32 jesusr Exp $
     Original revision: 1.11
-->