13 April 2013, 20:45

Hello

Kristina has now published the first version of the German Mahara manual 1.5. Thanks for your continous support. We are now starting  a review session and work also on the 1.6 version. 

There are some problems that Kristina found:

• footer text for screnshots are untranslated
• index is not translated

The PDF version needs also some improvements

• title is in english only
• header and footer texts are in english or partly in french.
• index is in english. This is the same problem as in online version

I've two suggestions for the text. Please add two paragraphs:

1. Information about authors, translators and contributors.
2. Licence information. Online this infornation is in the footer, but in the PDF and ePub version this should be added as a seperate paragraph

15 April 2013, 10:15

Hello Ralf,

As said in the German forum, I'm trying to get Sphinx 1.2beta installed to check what has improved there. Hopefully, the image captions and the index will be translatable.

The translated versions will have the correct words for "Table of contents" and "chapter" with the next cron run (tomorrow morning NZ time). German is already fixed, Dutch will be tomorrow morning.

I also added the license information to the index page so it can show up in the PDF and ePub version, but have not yet updated Launchpad with that lang string.

As for info about authors, translators and contributors, I'd prefer not to add names to the manual itself because that list will be difficult to maintain as it can change in a heart beat. I'd suggest to point to Launchpad for the translations and to Ohloh for everything else.

Cheers

Kristina

21 April 2013, 19:17

Hello,

I added the latest lang strings to Launchpad for all three versions of the manual (1.5-1.7). That also includes a link to Ohloh and Launchpad for the translations. Unfortunately, it's not easy to link to one page to see all contributors to a translation for a particular language because in contrast to Mahara, Sphinx splits its strings up into individual files and thus, the contributors are listed on these files only.

If someone has an idea of how / where to see all contributors of a translation easily, I'll happily link to these pages. As contributors change and thus might be overlooked, I'd prefer not to mention names in the manual itself, but rather link to places where they can be seen because the manual is constantly changing. It also depends which version of the manual you are looking at...

Cheers

Kristina

21 April 2013, 19:22

Hello Kristina,

great to see the improvements for the PDF export. It works now without the french wordings in some chapter elements. Can you check the epub link for German. It seems that the epub file is not created.

I've thought during last week about your comment related to info about authors, translators in the manual.

Launchpad and Ohloh are far away from the published manual and only other translators or developers will go to this pages sometimes. The manual is available in different formats and at different locations. I see two aspects: easy ways to get in contact with experienced people and the reputation for authors and translators.

The epub, pdf and html version of the manual will be placed at different locations for download without any connection to the opriginal location.  Readers can use them without web access. They should get information about this people who wrote the documentation.

I understand the argument that the number of people can change in a heartbeat. In the moment this is not the reality. The english version is exclusively written by you. The french, netherlands and German version is tranlated by one or a few people only. Don't know about the process in other languages.

For the reputation of a programm and in marketing its very relevant that people get access to translated documentations and see that there are people in their country who are working with the tool, that are experts and how they get contact to them.

If finally you don't want to add such information in the basic english version, are there any concern to do this in a chapter in the foreign versions?

Thanks for adding licence information. I suggest to move it to the introduction page  that people get this information easily.

Ralf
 

21 April 2013, 20:26

Hello Ralf,

Sorry, there was a setting that I had overlooked for the LaTeX export. I reverted the changes and tomorrow the contributors and the license will be shown earlier again and the chapter headings will be corrected.

I don't know why the ePub file was not created for 1.5 because it's there for other versions. It doesn't exist for English either. I had tested it last week and it was there. Maybe something went wrong during the generating of the file. It's quite a long process. I'll check when I'm back in the office.

As for the contributors, I understand your point. Could we compromise on me listing all the names in the English version as of the release date of the respective Mahara release? That alone would be currently checking 117 translation files (9 translations x 13 files for each). And then if something changes in between and translators wish to add their own names they can do so on Launchpad directly because it doesn't really matter what's written within a paragraph. If you happen to know a way of getting all translators listed more easily than clicking on the details page for each file, I'd be happy to know about it.

Cheers

Kristina

21 April 2013, 22:04

Hello Kristina,

thanks for your quick answer. I have  a very simple idea of the process I think. My idea was quite a simple text paragraph. I.e. : This manual was edited mainly by Kristina Hoeppner (kristina@your mail.com) in the english version. There are several translations available at... This German translation was edited mainly by. name1, name2, name3....

The third sentence is added only in the translated versions.

Any automatical check of translators in launchpad is possible, but it will add some people to the manual who are not aware that they ever translated anything for Mahara or don't know what Mahara is. This will happen if string elements are used in other applications with the same text.

Ralf