Documentation proposal

[Enrico Tröger]

On Mon, 4 May 2009 12:44:06 +0200, Jannis wrote:


>To emphasize the difference between our usual translations and
>documentation even more: the documentation will contain way more
>text than our applications and libraries. Translating them is a task on
>its own. I doubt that translating the docs will work without dedicated
>documentation translators. I'm not too worried about the

Addtionally, I think the relevance of translated documentation is a bit
overrated. Of course it is nice for users who don't know English that
good to read something in their native language. But then they must
rely on the translated docs, that is how the translater understood and
so translated the original English documentation which is a kind of
reference. If the translator got something wrong or translated it just
wrong or ambigous, the user who reads this is just lost and maybe turns
away thinking: that piece of software doesn't work, the docs say it
should but it doesn't.

Similar to translations in general but not that critical there.
I personally only read English docs if I read any docs as I usually
don't trust the translators. Ok, this is just me but unfortunately,
sometimes there is a reason too.
Just take this into account, thanks.


>The focus should be on having complete and up to date English
>documentation. That's quite a challenge already. 

Amen.
That's the whole point: talking about an infrastructure to get
translations for the docs is nice but the very most important thing
before is to get something to translate.


Besides that, I completely agree with Jérôme and Jannis who seem to be
the only ones who got the point: the used documentation system(docbook,
rest, wiki, whatever) should be easy to use for documenters who
actually do the work, not for developers who prefer about 400 different
tags for markup (like Docbook).


Regards,
Enrico

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