How to efficiently publish 88 guides in 42 languages

Thu 18 November 2010

Eighty-eight (88) guides in forty-two (42) languages comes out to be six hundred and thirty (630) guides that have been published, so far, to the Fedora Docs website.  That includes everything from Fedora Core 1 to today.  With the release of Fedora 14, earlier this month, we introduced twelve new guides to the system that were translated into a number of languages.

Now, I'm not saying that this isn't great.  It is quite fantastic!  The problem comes from the way we've been handling all the source.  Right now generally one person is responsible for compiling all the different languages and pushing them up to the docs.fp.o website.  Keeping track of which languages got published is not easy as the L10n teams are constantly turning out new translations.  The work load has increased in recent releases and keeping track of which guides have been published and which have not has become a problem.

We've talked about this before but nothing has officially happened. What I would like to see happen is for the translation teams to take responsibility for building their translations and publishing them to the Fedora Docs website when they feel their work is ready to be seen by the world.  Some teams, such as the Spanish team, are already doing this which is a great relief.

Once we get all translation teams doing this the next step is getting these guides packaged and into the Fedora repository. Publican should be able to do the heavy lifting of creating the SPEC and SRPM for each guide allowing translation teams to create their packages very efficiently.

There currently exists procedures for publishing guides using Publican on the Fedora Wiki.  A recent upgrade in Publican has made publishing incredibly easy and an upcoming release should take all the guess work out of publishing and packaging.

By Sparks, Category: Computers

Tags: translations / accessibility /