Update on Localisation Style Guides and Glossaries

[Michael Twomey <michael twomey ireland sun com>]

Hi,
	Sorry there hasn't been any further talk about the Gnome Localisation
Style Guidelines or the glossary I was putting together recently but
I've been on holidays.

In order to get things moving again I've done the following:

1. Taken the set of English terms used by Gnome applications produced by
our term mining tool and put them into a Gnumeric spreadsheet, creating
a glossary/list of terms.

The following needs to be done to the glossary:
* Tidy it up and remove any unnecessary terms, particularly duplicate
lower case terms.
* Add in speech information where necessary (adj, n, v etc.)
* Insert a definition for each term.
* Merge in other glossaries.
* Currently it is in English only. It needs other languages to be filled
in. This should be done after the English has been cleaned up.

Does anyone have time to volunteer to start by cleaning up the English
before we start working on the language versions?

Should we remove the application information or keep it? Currently the
term list has two columns, one for terms and one for applications they
appear in. The application information might be superfluous.

Should we have one spreadsheet or multiple versions, one for each
locale?

Also it might be beneficial to convert the glossary into a database to
allow people to more easily edit it but this can be done in the future.
If anyone has a suggestion for a better format to store the glossary in
please tell me as a large spreadsheet is a bit awkward to use.

2. I've created a tarball of the Frame Maker source + pdf + mif of the
Style Guidelines. Basically I've bundled the English, French, German,
Italian, Spanish and Swedish style guides together as well as exporting
the Frame Maker files into pdf and mif.

The following still needs to be done to the style guides:
* Convert or rewrite them into docbook format.
* Rewrite them to make them more Gnome friendly. All the references to
Sun need to be changed for a start.

I'd like to hear if anyone has any suggestions for other things that
need to be done to these documents or a better way to handle them.

All I need right now is someone to take the files and place them under
the Gnome CVS tree and to place them in an appropriate place on the
Gnome web site. I'd also be interested to know if anyone has time to
help clean up the English glossary and then to help populate the various
localised versions.

thanks,
	Michael


-- 
Michael Twomey
These opinions are my own and do not represent Sun unless otherwise
stated.
Sun Microsystems, Dublin, 8199164, x19164
"Fly my little Makefiles! Fly!"