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Translating Free Software?
InnerPeace Volunteers asks:
"We'd like to translate our free software into other languages
besides English. Our total budget for this is 0. Any suggestions on
how to get this done?" The hardest part of getting people to
translate anything, sometimes, is finding the talent to do it.
Once done, it should be fairly easy to break things down into pieces
and assign them to each person. Documentation is easy to translate,
but how might code be best (re-)designed to make translating
the programs internal dialog less of a bear for those working on the
project? Is I18N still the best route for a multi-lingual program,
or are there better options?
Your small collection of HTML files???
To be honest, it doesn't look like a very big task apart from the actual english->SomethingElse step. Cliff's comments are correct - but not relevent to what I see on your site. Step 1 is obviously a little note on your homepage asking for volunteers to do the translating.
I'm sure for a few $$$ you could persuade some language students at the local college to help.
I've been involved with the translation of an HTML based application - commericially and for an international company, so the translation bit was easy - and HTML is a pain to deal with.
It was hard for the translators to distinguish between things that should be translated and things that shouldn't be because the content, the formatting and the scripting is so intertwined. The scripting problems were eased by going the traditional route of splitting localisable strings into a separate file and loading controls dynamically at run time. The solution to the rest was good QA.
Mmmmmmm
libre logiciel
Lesson 1.1
In French, the adjective usually comes *after* the noun:
e.g. logiciel libre
Therefore my suggestion to the submitter is this: make sure whoever is translating to a language is a native who learned english, and not an english native who learned the foreign language, even if they tell you they can do it. Else you *will* get a "Zero Wing" translation to some degree. I've seen so many awkward translations, trust me, you need a native speaker.