HEADSUP: Translations of our documentations

[Gabor Kovesdan]

Dear Folks,

I'm writing this mail to get your attention about the importance of our 
documentation projects. We tend to neglect the importance of the 
translation projects, thinking that the majority of our users speaks the 
English language well and does not need any documents in other 
languages. It is not really true, though. Expert users tend to speak 
English well, but nowadays the UNIX-like systems are not limited to 
expensive servers and workstations because they can serve as a cheap and 
efficient replacement for the commercial desktop operating systems, too. 
FreeBSD also aims to be a multi-purpose operating system and its derived 
projects, PC-BSD and DesktopBSD are especially designed for desktop 
users. There are ongoing efforts to make FreeBSD easier to install so 
that everybody can install it on his own desktop system. Apart from 
this, it is also necessary to provide more language support for those, 
who don't speak English so well. Furthermore, the user basis what we can 
get by providing better language support will thank us the effort; don't 
forget that contributors will grow up from users and committers will 
grow up from contributors. Summarizing this, language support is 
demanded, useful and shows up as an "added value" of a software product.

If you translate, it is not only useful for the project, but useful for 
you. Let's see what you get if you start translating documents. First of 
all, you get respect. Users will say thanks to you and will respect you 
for what you have done for them. Secondly, there's no better translator 
reference than a published translation on a website of such a well-known 
and respected product, like FreeBSD. It is something that you can make 
use of, that you can present in your CV as a working experience of a 
translator. Thirdly, FreeBSD uses a well-designed infrastructure of its 
documentation using technologies and standards, like SGML, XML, XSLT, 
HTML, DocBook, DSSSL, CSS. Using these tools to design infrastructures 
to develop technical documentation is an independent profession, which 
is called Documentation Engineer. At the first sight, this markup might 
seem complicated and difficult to you, but if you are committed enough, 
you can get some knowledge of it, which is again, something like that 
you can make use of in your career.

So, what do you think? Do you feel like translating? If so, you need to 
find out how to start out. If there is an existing documentation project 
for your language, refer to the appropriate link on the translators page 
to get the details about joining: 
http://www.freebsd.org/docproj/translations.html

If there's no such project yet, you can refer to the doc at FreeBSD.org 
mailing list for further information. I'm also happy to give a helping 
hand to new volunteers wanting to join the project. There is also a wiki 
page set up for the translation project with general information: 
http://wiki.freebsd.org/DocTranslationProjects

Thanks for your attention and I'm looking further to your comments and 
suggestions.

Regards,
Gábor Kövesdán