[darcs-users] Translation to russian

[Trent W. Buck]

Jason Dagit <dagit at codersbase.com> writes:

>> I checked russian wiki page and didn't found russian version of Darcs
>> manual. I'd like to start this work but I'm not sure which format is
>> main.  What is basic source for making translation and how it should
>> be committed?
>
> Unless I'm mistaken (completely possible) we don't have a precedent for
> non-english translations of the manual.

Jason is correct; we currently have no translations of the user manual
and I'm not sure how we'd go about adding them.

What I suggest you look into first is http://bugs.darcs.net/issue1487,
which involves adding the infrastructure to translate help text and
error messages *within* Darcs.  If that's implemented, we could have
something like this:

    $ LANG=en_AU darcs help get
    Usage: darcs get [OPTION]... <REPOSITORY> [<DIRECTORY>]
    Create a local copy of a repository.
    [...]

    $ LANG=ru_RU darcs help get
    Применение: darcs get [OPTION]... <REPOSITORY> [<DIRECTORY>]
    Создайте локальную копию хранилища.
    [...]

(Note that the above translation is probably incorrect, as I asked a
computer to do it.)

What I would like to avoid is making a full copy of the user manual,
then having translators work on it piecemeal -- because what you will
end up with is divergent manuals, where updates to the English version
do not migrate to the Russian version, and good ideas in the Russian
version don't make it back into the English version.

Aside from being widely used and understood, I believe gettext makes it
easy for translators to list all the new English text that needs to be
translated.