Translation od LibreOffice Guides

l10n
#1

Hi,

perhaps you know that 6 LibreOffice guides exist:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications
Members of the documentation team try to keep them up to date, so quite
often there are new releases.

A few translations already exist (french, german dutch, italian...) and
recently the Slovak of the Getting Started Guide was added:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications/sk
(Chapter 8 is still missing).

For that we have developed a workflow, which saved us a lot of work. It
is based on the OmegaT CAT tool and enables
- to reuse a non-OmegaT translation of an old version of the Guide to
translate its current version (with some extra effort)
- to reuse the current OmegaT translation to translate its future
versions (straightforward, no extra effort necessary)
- to build a team project, where several translators work together (our
wiki with detailed instructions (Slovak only):
https://code.google.com/p/sk-libreoffice-guides/w/list)
- to use Google translate in batch mode (both from English and a also
other language - we tested that on Czech-Slovak)

We started to translate version 4.0 of the guide (using a partial
translation of the 3.6 version) and in the middle we switched to 4.2.
Thanks to OmegaT only the differences had to be translated. According
to our experience one can save a significant amount of work, mostly with
respect to the future versions.

I have just presented the workflow at the LibreOffice conference:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/m83raie79tqqvn4/AAD6J-96dDaFlAfqQsY9maU9a?dl=0
where you can find more.

If you find this workflow useful and would like to start translating the
guides (or reuse old translations), I will be glad to help. I can also
translate the instructions from the Slovak wiki to English.

best regards
Milos

#2

Hi :slight_smile:
That sounds like a good tool! The English Docs Team have run into a
problem translating the German handbook for Base and OmegaT sounds like it
might help them with that.

They normally use ODFAuthors to edit the "Published Guides" and that
usually helps them keep track of chapters as they go through the processes
of reviewing and proof-reading. Other teams are welcome to use ODFAuthors
and some do already. Annoyingly you have to apply to get registered and
only 1 or 2 people on the English Docs Team knows how to do that so there
is often a delay. If you go that route it might be a good plan to try to
get at least 1 person in your team to get high enough permissions to
register people yourself.

However it sounds like the OmegaT tools might be better for translators
anyway. I just always feel happier if there is a choice and that havign
started with 1 tool it's possible to migrate to the other if things don't
work out. :slight_smile:
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile: