Localizing MDC: ideas
Nukeador
I'm going to share the Spanish Team ideas about MDC, maybe we can create
later a wiki page with all Teams ideas to have them in one place.
*_
Spanish team summary_*
*What have we done?*
* The "How to help" documentation is completely translated and it's
important to catch new contributors
* In the main page we have links to this documentation
* We have a mailing list and a IRC channel for communication
* When a new user contributes for the first time, we write in his
discussion page a "Welcome message" with all the info about how to
contribute (links to docs and mailing list/IRC channel)
* We have a few templates/categories to help us with translations:
o "Translation in progress" template
(http://developer.mozilla.org/es/docs/Plantilla:traducci%C3%B3n)
+ Like the wikipedia one, this template shows an info
box with links to the original page and to the edit
section of the localised one. Also it adds the article
in "Need translation" category. This way we can track
all the pages that are being translated.
o "Translate me" template
(http://developer.mozilla.org/es/docs/Plantilla:trad%C3%BAceme)
+ This template should be used with important articles
that we want to translate. We change in the parent
page the link to the page with the template and we get
a small flag that indicates that that article is being
translated and we need help. The flag links to the
edit page directly.
o "Needs technical review" and "Needs grammatical review"
categories
+ With these two categories we can mark the translated
articles if we think that a reviewer should check them.
o "Trash" template
(http://developer.mozilla.org/es/docs/Plantilla:basura)
+ With this template we can mark articles to be removed
with the "To remove" category. The MDC admins could
see a list of articles to remove in one page.
o We have a page with recommendations about how to translate
(http://developer.mozilla.org/es/docs/Ayuda:Como_traducir)
and how to use the templates. Also recommending some
translation tools like gTranslate extension, the firefox
dictionary, wordreference search plugin or the Open-Tran
extension to search in their glossary database.
*Thoughts*
* It's important to be subscribed at the recentchanges RSS to track
modifications and new users.
* Priorities
o Important pages for the project or a new release, like
Firefox 2 for developers
o Popular pages in the English site (idea taken from French team)
o Personal choices depending on our interests
* Difficulties
o How to track changes in the original article?
+ Maybe creating a template that notices the user that a
page is maybe outdated. If the original article was
modified (not a lesser modification) after the last
modification in the localized one this box should appear.
o Keep translators attention
+ We have to be always in contact with translator
difficulties and problems to solve them. Try to avoid
the "burnout syndrome" with recommendations.
--
Nukeador
Clave PGP: http://www.nukeador.com/pgp/