Editing the Localisation Guide

We would like you to contribute the knowledge you have to make this guide more comprehensive. The main aim of the guide is to reduce the pain experienced by most localisers in finding the correct information on specific project and in contributing for the first time.

Please add your wisdom and help save others from experiencing your pain.

First things first

Please familiarise yourself with the guide so that you are aware if any of the content you want to add is already present. We don’t want to duplicate information because if we do:

  • The information become dated and disagrees across the different sections
  • We’re trying to make a guide that is as general and only specific when needed and then only where needed

What goes where

The wiki contains some distinct sections:

  • The guides to the Translate Toolkit
  • This guide – the localisers guide
  • A glossary of localisation terms

Each of these make use of namespaces to distinguish sections from each other. Please make sure you are editing in the right place.

The localiser guide is broken down into the following broad sections:

  • Running a localisation project in general
  • Information specific to the major localisation projects
  • Guides for translators that cut across all projects
  • Hints for developers so that they can help localisers

Please place content in the relevant section. Please don’t duplicate content but rather link to the relevant section in the other parts of the guide.

Headings

Generally each page has an H1 heading and all other headings are below that. Please make use of section headings for clarity (it also makes it possible for others to link to your sections). Also use high level headings starting from H1 in your document as this then creates the nice table of contents automatically.

Style

We are not that particular about the style of writing (well we haven’t seen any awful stuff yet). But please do stay to the point and feel free to give personal examples and to use personal pronouns. Eg “we have found that”. The guide text is quite formal but if you need to, then add humour as needed.

Spelling and Grammar

Firstly I can’t spell! We also realise that some contributors are not native English speakers so don’t worry too much about that – or ask someone on translat-devel@lists.sourceforge.net to check you spelling and grammar. The main idea is that it be understandable. Ask yourself, “Would this help me learn something, start something or start contributing?” If the answer is “Yes.”, then your content is probably good enough.

Licensing

This guide is under a creative commons license. Please be aware of that before adding your content and be aware that copy and paste might violate someone elses copyright – rather write from scratch or paraphrase the documents you want to copy.

Credit

Everyone wants credit. Please add your name to the credits page.

Using Namespaces

The guide makes extensive use of namespaces, e.g. translation/variables.html refers to the variables page in the translation section of this guide.

Adding another language or translating

FIXME

Please make use of namespaces to separate your translations from the main document. Use your languages iso639 code as the namespace. For Zulu this page would be referred to as

zu:guide:editing