[tei-council] Internationalization/translation (Bug 312)

[Martin Holmes]

I've been working on the venerable Bug 312, which is about planning the
next round of translation work.

I've written to the original French team leader, but had no response. On
Italian, Fabio has very kindly offered to take the lead, and will be
looking for people willing to help. I haven't written to the leaders of 
German, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish or Russian yet; I think we need to 
move forward with a couple of languages to get our process worked out 
and tested. I've just heard back from Marcus Bingenheimer, who led the 
Chinese work, and this is his response:

> I got in touch with one of my former collaborators on the project,
> Huang Weining, and yes we can provide another round of editing and
> updating. I realize that there must have been many changes since 2009
> but I think the TEI has to find an update mechanism for the I18s
> otherwise we might as well not do them.
>
> The file looks like Sebastian outputted the Spanish localization and
> highlighted changes (yellow) and missing fields (red) since the
> localization was submitted. This would work for us. We are happy to
> work from a spreadsheet, but if the TEI wants to build something that
> alerts maintainers of localizations and lets them submit changes
> directly online it might save a step.
>
> There is also the question of examples, which are the true place for
> localization as opposed to mere translation. We should be able to
> change or add to these as well.
>
> Last not least I wanted to ask if there are funds available for this.
> I am happy to volunteer my time, but Weining is a grad student and
> would need to be funded somehow.

I'm copying Marcus and Weining on this message. Marcus is right that the 
examples also must be updated; they're not currently included in the 
spreadsheet, but on the ticket, Sebastian suggests it should be doable, 
so perhaps we should actually build that in. Marcus is also right that 
we must have a procedure in place for keeping translations updated. This 
might be slightly ad-hoc and human-managed (for instance, once a month, 
someone checks the current spreadsheet and inserts any updates into the 
source code, then re-generates the spreadsheet). Another option, of 
course, is to write a fancy web application that provides a nice GUI and 
change-tracking and all that, but that is likely to take longer than 
updating the translations; I'd like to try with the spreadsheet at least 
initially, because it's simple.

On the issue of money: is there any? We mentioned this briefly in 
Oxford, but I think we would need to talk to the Board about it. If we 
can get a bit of money, I'd like to suggest that we go ahead with 
Chinese and Italian as an initial pilot.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Martin


-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(mholmes at uvic.ca)