[openbeos] Re: BeBook license

Axel Dörfler <axeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I personally think, we just shouldn't care about any translations. 
> Development language is English - if anybody wants to contribute 
> directly to the project, at least.

Well, IIRC from last BeGeistert, you are an university student (computer 
sciences?). Students generally tend to have little problems with English 
because they have grown up learning the language at school and deal with 
it a lot in lectures and books.

There are, however, lots of hobby programmers who may understand enough 
English to grasp the meaning of method names and so on but who can't 
easily read long English texts. The translation we're doing is aimed at 
them. The [insert language here] BeBook is not intended for core 
developers, but all those who write simpler or relatively small apps. Of 
course, there won't be any attempts to translate example source code 
(after all, this is not VisualBasic here :-)).

All those who can read German can check out my translation guidelines at 
http://www.jstarek.de/openbeos/guidelines.pdf
They show how I tried to prevent having nicely translated pages with 
useless content in. (Btw: I still need feedback on those rules!)

> Of course, if there is a team which takes up the task and keep the 
> translations up to date, I would appreciate it.

There will be - but there will have to be some synchronization between 
the developers and the doc team (see below).

> But I think the responsibility of keeping the original English 
> documentation up-to-date should lie in the hands of the developers of the
> corresponding component - else I don't expect it to work too well.

I don't know if I'm right there, but I think Jeff Biss (the doc team 
lead) posted a request to this mailing list a while ago asking developers 
to point out any changes in the API to him. Personally, I cross-check 
with the current CVS entries sometimes (but not every day).

  Jürgen

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