Starting a gnome-users-guide translation howto, was: Re: Hi there

[Alexander Shopov <ash contact bg>]

> A friend of mine wants to start translating the GNOME user guide.
...
Hi Arangel,

I am writing to you and cc-ing the gnome doc list to make sure that if I 
 mess something up, there will be someone to raise objections.

This will be a simple description - in order to have it in the mail 
archives and reuse it if necessary.

OK. In order to start the translation you need to do these things:

1. Subscribe to gnome-doc-list gnome org and announce your intentions.
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-doc-list

2. Get the originals of the documentation:
If you have a committers account:
CVS_RSH=ssh cvs -d:ext:al_shopov cvs gnome org:/cvs/gnome co gnome-user-docs

If you do not:
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous anoncvs gnome org:/cvs/gnome co gnome-user-docs

More info on using GNOME CVS as translator here:
http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html

If you do not have a committers account and you want to start a 
translation: get one *NOW* and I mean it.
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/policies/accounts/requesting.html

Web interface to the CVS repo is here: 
http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-user-docs/

3. Generate po files.
cd gnome-user-docs/gnome2-user-guide/
mkdir mk # your 2-letter language code
cd mk
xml2po -l mk -e -o mk.po ../C/*xml

Check the output of xml2po --help
and man xml2po

I would also recommend that you have separate po-files for each xml file 
of the user guide. So you generate them like this:
for i in ../C/*.xml; do  xml2po -e -o `basename $i.xml .xml`.po $i; done

Keep and work on these files (maybe in a staging repo somewhere) and 
then merge them back to the original mk.po file mentioned above.

4. Commit as early as possible. Do *not* over-rely on a different system 
(for example a wiki) for the sources will soon drift apart and whoever 
gets to merge will be in a dire position. If you need to make such 
compromises - merge often! I still have no time to merge our 
translations back to GNOME CVS.

5. Pay some attention to the pictures. They go into the mk/figures directory

When you add them:
cvs add -kb blah-blah.png

Kind regards:
al_shopov

> A friend of mine wants to start translating the GNOME user guide. I see
> that you already have it translated into Bulgarian so I wanted to ask
> you if that's the latest version of the user guide, I couldn't find
> anything that seems to be new in GNOME's CVS. I also couldn't find a PO
> file, I suppose it's somehow converted from an xml file or something...
> anyhow.. I would appreciate it if you can spare a few minutes to ligthen
> up things for me.