On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 06:36:59PM +0900, Masao Uebayashi wrote:
> > > I favor having translated documentation in the base system.
> > 
> > I'd put this point even stronger: having such documentation, if available,
> > anywere else would be completely wrong.
> 
> Translations, by definition, delay, and lost accuracy / quality from
> the original text to some extent.  Are such situations okay even if
> translations be as a part of NetBSD base?

Speaking out of the experience of being part of the team translating
the NetBSD Website to german, I cannot agree with a loss of accuracy
or quality. In fact, it's rather the other way round; nearly no one
but a translator will realize little logical errors or bad wording
in a document, because most people don't read THAT thoroughly.

So, in fact, the _english_ website has been improved at some places
in course of the translation. I don't think this would hurt the man-
pages either.

The only problems I see is that of too high automation (translations
MUST be proofread before being checked in!), and the admitted possible
delay between updates of original pages, and their translation. On the
other hand could a software, which knew which pages are already trans-
lated, and which knew the adress of the forums of various translation
teams, scan the cvs commits, and notify the appropriate forums (maybe
even with a diff attached) that an already translated page has changed.

For the website, I'm doing this partially "by hand", or not at all
because I'm lazy :) But if I had a list of changed pages which out-
dates some of the translated ones, I think it would be MUCH easier
to keep it up-to-date.

Maybe a structure similar to www@netbsd.org could try to guarantuee
some degree of response time, too.

Regards,

-Martin Weber