Fwd: A sample of GNOME documentation written to the style guide

[Cecilia Platz <Cecilia Platz Sun COM>]

Hi,

I just wanted to forward a message that was sent to the gnome-doc-list
alias, since we are hoping for some feedback on the quality of the
translations.  Translations of a sample of Gnome documentation which was
written to the Style Guide have been posted at the following Gnome CVS
location:

gnome-docu/gdp/contrib/gfontsel

The localization group at Sun would really appreciate feedback on these
translations.  We are particularly interested in hearing about the
linguistic quality of the translation, and about the quality of the
linguistic style of translation.  These translations were created using
the Style Guides, located at:

/gnome-i18n/l10n-style-guides

and the glossaries, located at:

/gnome-i18n/glossary

Have we achieved consistency in the translations?  Have we followed the
Style Guides?  Are there other translation issues we should be aware of?

Please send comments and feedback to cecilia.platz@sun.com,
michael.twomey@sun.com, and lorna.whelan@sun.com.  Or of course you can
always send them to this alias, too.  Thank you!

-Cecilia



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Message: 1
From: Patrick.Costello@Sun.COM
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 21:27:50 +0430 (GMT+04:30)
To: gnome-doc-list@gnome.org
Subject:  A sample of GNOME documentation written to the style guide. 

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Hi, 

The documentation team at Sun is currently reworking a number of the
GNOME 
online reference manuals to ship with the GNOME on Solaris release. The
Sun team is applying the guidelines that are in the draft GNOME Style
Guide. As the style guide is still developing, things could still
change, so we are holding off for a few more weeks before we translate
all of the manuals we are working on. However, to test the validity of
the approach, we have already translated one of our reworked manuals,
the Font Selector manual, into the nine languages relevant for Sun. The
document went through the translation process smoothly. 

We are making the manual and the language versions available at the
following 
GNOME CVS location: 

gnome-docu/gdp/contrib/gfontsel

By following the guidelines in the draft GNOME Style Guide, the writer
produced a document that the translation team could translate quickly
and easily. We welcome all comments regarding the English original and
the language versions of this manual. 

In addition, you will notice that we have moved all non-technical
information 
from the main body of the manual to a Title Page. As well as improving 
information accessibility and therefore usability, this strategy also 
facilitates rapid translation. Also, the GFDL calls for putting
non-technical 
information into a Title Page. The tools do not have the functionality
yet to 
put the Title Page link in the appropriate place, so attached to this
mail is a 
dummy page that shows where the link would appear. Also attached is a
suggested 
Title Page with some ideas for content. Again, we welcome comments about
this 
proposed format. 

Notes
-----

Please be aware of the following points when you review the Font
Selector manual and the language versions:

- The English language version of the manual is the only version that
currently contains screen captures. The other language versions refer to
screen captures but they are not included. 

- Nautilus ignores paragraph breaks within bulleted or numbered lists.
You will notice some rather long paragraphs which should in fact be
displayed as several paragraphs. We tried to address this as much as
possible in the English version.    

- Nautilus has a problem with accented characters in Section 1 level
titles and book titles. When Nautilus comes across an accent, the
application finishes the title and places the rest of the title on the
next paragraph. Nautilus does not have the same problem with Section 2
level titles. We are going to investigate thoroughly and file a bug.

- The book title of the Swedish language version contains an accent so
the complete title does not display.
 
- There are three complete sentences in the German language version that
were not translated to German. 

- The sgml code for the Asian locales is not indented but are one long
string, which is a requirement for our translation tools. We were afraid
to run our pretty tool on multi-byte locales in case it inserted a
return in the middle
of a multi-byte.

- Some characters are displayed as "?"  in zh_TW.  This is a bug of the
font selection algorithm of GNOME, not of translation. Bug filed several
weeks ago. 

Hopefully, the translations demonstrate the benefits that the GNOME
documentation project can achieve by writing to a well-defined style
guide. 

As I said above, all comments are welcome, 

Pat Costello