Translations portal
From LilyPond Wiki
Translating LilyPond web site and documentation is a good way to help both developers and new users.
This page is the starting point for future translators: it provides motivations, resources to get started and additional hints and tips.
Contents |
[edit] Motivation
[edit] Having LilyPond web site and documentation in your own language
The first thing new visitors will see is the web site. Reading the site in their native language will help them understand why Lily really is great software, supported by a large community.
The documentation is an essential component of LilyPond, as you cannot use much of this piece of software without reading the Tutorial; as many people do not read English fluently enough to understand the documentation well, translations really help with increasing the number of users.
[edit] Integrating translations in LilyPond main project
It is highly profitable to integrate translations in the official project for several reasons:
- this makes translations available to a wide audience, thanks to automatic language selection on lilypond.org and distribution of translations in the sources, the binaries and the downloadable documentation;
- all integrated documentation benefits from the building infrastructure using Texinfo as source format, Texi2html and GNU Texinfo to produce documentation with a high-quality layout in HTML and PDF;
- thanks to the power of Git revision control system, translators who integrate their work into the official sources use dedicated tools for translations creation, updating and maintenance.
The only cost of these advantages is learning Texinfo source format and Git revision control system, but this page should help you with getting started, and the Translations Meister is happy to answer all your questions on LilyPond development list or privately.
[edit] General instructions
[edit] Web site translation
Translating the website means also maintaining it. The web pages are sometimes changed, rewritten or updated. This changes have to be checked by the maintainer, to get the translated pages up to date.
[edit] Requirements
You need a Unix box including a Bourne-compatible shell (like bash), diff, patch, GNU Make, Gettext, Python, git, network access and an UTF-8 capable editor (like Emacs, Vim, JEdit...).
If you use Microsoft Windows, you will get all that by installing Cygwin; if you use Mac OS X (10.2 or later, 10.4 recommended), installing Fink is a way to get all requirements.
If you really want to build the website (this is not required for translation), you will need Inkscape in addition.
[edit] Begin and maintain the translation
Please follow instructions from http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=lilypond.git;a=blob;f=README;hb=web
These are a few technical caveats:
- use UTF-8 encoding. LilyPond server uses this encoding.
- be careful that special (i.e., non-ascii) characters may be messed up by email transfers, so it may be a good idea to replace them by their corresponding html code (codes with &).
[edit] Documentation Translation
A draft of instructions is available at http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=lilypond.git;a=blob_plain;f=Documentation/TRANSLATION;hb=lilypond/translation
Thanks to Valentin Villenave for the translation from French of the "Detailed instructions — user manual" section.
— Musicovore 13:45, 18 March 2007 (CET)
[edit] Hints
Here are various hints that may translators with general organization and daily work.
[edit] Team work
Don't hesitate to talk about your translation plans, privately with your cotranslators, or if needed on the LilyPond lists. Working with other people will make the translations better, faster and easier. Each translator can read the work from each other, and make useful changes.
If you want to send some of your first translations on the list, remember to use utf-8 encoding, and even maybe .zip or .tar.bz2 compression, so your total mail doesn't get heavier than 80 KB.
However, patches are the most convenient way to send small corrections.
[edit] How to make patches
[edit] git patches
To get a patch against the last commit, do:
git diff > foo.patch
The changes will be written in file. To apply a git patch, do:
git apply < bar.patch
[edit] Local patches
To create a patch between two local files, run:
diff -u origFile modifFile > file.patch
To apply the patch, just run:
patch -p0 < file.patch
[edit] See also
- Documentation coordination
- Fr:Aide sur la traduction du site web: French translations coordination page.
