Kálmán Kéménczy wrote:
imho translation is hard work. this is not enough to know your langugae and the source (English) well, but you need lots of other knowledge.
- if you translate wiki, you have to know and understand the wiki syntax - if you translate the software (e.g. yast) you have to be familiar with glossary, the hotkeys in the text, the translation memery, svn and sometimes you have to deal with gettext as well. I think this is the biggest problem. we need more than a translator when we talk about software translation, we need a technical background as well. - if you would like to translate the book, you will need to know how the things work in the susedoc package, how you could buid a book to see and double check your works.
Indeed. However, even if one is neither good at English nor familiar with such methods, (s)he can still help translators by proofreading translations, because (s)he definitely is good at the target language (= his/her native tongue). Translators always need feedback to polish their translations. But on the other hand, 'it's easy' or 'you can do' is not enough. I have been translating openSUSE Weekly News into Japanese and posted call for help to -ja list every week for 2 and half years, but unfortunately there are only few who would step forward to help us. People won't be motivated even if the task is easy. It must be fun, or at least, be to one's great profit.
so, i strongly recommend to find a mentor who could help you in the first 1-2 months. I believe it's a must and worth it :)
I wish a mentor would not only teach new comers technical knowledge on translating, but also show them how fun and beneficial to translate documents. So, translators, please also share your experiences how fun to translate documents and what kind of benefits you have got from translating. For me, what's fun and benefits are: - could have a substantial vocabulary on technology - could got leading-edge information and trends on FLOSS What are yours? :-) Best, -- _/_/ Satoru Matsumoto - openSUSE Member - Japan _/_/ _/_/ Marketing/Weekly News/openFATE Screening Team _/_/ _/_/ mail: helios_reds_at_gmx.net / irc: HeliosReds _/_/ _/_/ http://blog.zaq.ne.jp/opensuse/ _/_/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ambassadors+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ambassadors+help@opensuse.org