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The Brave GNU World seeks to establish a worldwide forum for the GNU Project and
even if most people may be able to read English a lot of them prefer their native
language. For this reason I consider the translators an important part of this
project and I very much welcome their help.
Having a monthly column coming out simultaneously in many languages is no small task
and needs to be coordinated, so if you want to join in, you might want to take the
following steps:
- Contact me via Email (greve@gnu.org) and tell me
about your plans. If there is someone else who is already working on your language,
I will point you in his/her direction so you can join your efforts.
- My answer will probably contain a "great" and point you towards this page to get a grasp
of the organisation. Feel free to ignore it or tell me you have read it already... .-)
- Consider looking for one or two people as your "co-translators" in case you are sick, overly
busy or not reachable when a new issue is being released. I like all efforts but it only makes
real sense if the translation becomes a continued task.
- Look for proofreaders for your language. This is important and can't be emphasized enough.
Without proofreaders you will make more mistakes and fixing them later is much more work.
If you don't know where to find proofreaders I might be able to help you find some.
- Send me a mail with the email-addresses of all translators and proofreaders together with a
list of languages they are able to read. I will then add them to my proofreading lists or
forward the names to the other translators so they put the addresses on theirs. It would be
preferrable if everyone would at least be on the English or German list because those are the
versions that I do myself.
- Then you start translating the main page, this page (optional)
and the previous issues of the current year. This is
quite some work to begin with but later on it'll only be one issue a month and that's not too much
work (at least in my experience).
A complete cycle of the Brave GNU World looks like this:
- I write the German version, pipe it through my German proofreaders between one and three times and
then send it to the editorial staff of the Linux-Magazin.
- The German version gets translated into English as soon as possible (depending on how stressed
out I am) and then gets sent around to the English proofreaders.
- The webpages are being collected and prepared by me for the next version.
- When the Linux-Magazin comes out and all translations have been sent in, I put the new version
online and announce it.
And so noone can say he/she didn't know:
Since I would hate to see discussions about unreleased issues, please advise all your co-translators
and proofreaders to treat it somewhat confidential until the issue has been released in all
languages.
About the format of the translations:
- only HTML, same style as all other pages
- please make sure the links are correct
- please stick to the webstructure - so take a good look!
- all pages should have the language navigation buttons on top
- all pages should give the name of the translator, a commented out
structure is provided already.
- it might be a good idea to have a sentence like "please write mail to
column@gnu.org in English
or German, other languages won't be understood.
Okay - these should (hopefully) be the most common questions you may have. If there is more,
just ask me.
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