We've been working on a User Guide for Drupal 8 for about a year now, and the English version is in pretty good shape -- it's in the stage now of copy editing and image refinement, and we're working on making a home for it under drupal.org/documentation. (If you are interested in helping with copy editing, see https://groups.drupal.org/node/512211 by the way -- there is still time to help!) So, it's about time to think about translating the guide to some (and hopefully, eventually all) of the 100+ languages that Drupal supports.
To start the translation process off, we need to figure out a translation workflow that will make sense for the translation teams. The problem is, it doesn't really make sense to use the same workflow as is used on https://localize.drupal.org for the short strings that are part of Drupal and contributed modules, themes, and distributions (see https://www.drupal.org/node/2762261 for details -- but the problem is that the guide is about 100 pages of formatted text prose, not a bunch of short strings). Therefore, what we'd like to do is work with one or two translation teams to define the details of a new translation process, and then after the process is working smoothly for the teams from those one or two languages, we'll open up the User Guide to be translated into other languages. Thus, at this stage, we're looking to make contact with one or two language teams, each with 1-2 team leaders. The team leaders would need to recruit translators and editors from existing language communities on localize.drupal.org.
Skills needed (or at least desirable) in the team leaders:
* Expert-level knowledge of the non-English language, and decent communication skills in English.
* Some experience translating and/or reviewing translations (on localize.drupal.org, or other written material, especially books or articles about Drupal).
* Some experience with maintaining projects (contributed modules and themes) on drupal.org (a representative from each team will most likely need to review and commit patches for their language in the User Guide, using Git on drupal.org).
* Organization and small group leadership.
* Willingness to try out an experimental process and report back frankly (in English) with suggestions for improving it.
If interested, please start by discussing this within your language group on localize.drupal.org, and when you have a team organized, contact me (https://www.drupal.org/u/jhodgdon) or post a comment here. We'll hopefully get this started fairly soon... Thanks!
Comments
Count me in, please
One year is a quite long period, so thanks a lot for your continuous efforts to documentate D8.
As a Leader of Hungarian Localization Team, I'd be happy to visit the area of Documentation as well. In the upcoming weeks I plan to dedicate my limited freetime to get to know better the Documentation iniative and how things goes here. At Drupalaton 2016 I'll also spend my sprint time with this job.
As D8 (just as D7 too) was already 100%-translated to Hungarian for the Release Day and since then is continuously maintained to be up-to-date, thus our vocabulary, terminology, phrases and expressions are quite settled and homogeneous. So I believe that we could be a good testing subject for Documentation.
Thanks!
The Catalan team has also volunteered to help test the User Guide translation process and be one of the first languages, and it will be great to have a second one. Especially these two languages, because I know that both groups are well organized and experienced, and will hopefully be willing to be critical of the process (in a constructive way) so that we can make it work better for the other language groups who follow.
Please see
https://www.drupal.org/node/2762261
for details of the process we are proposing. If you have time to look over the links in the issue summary to the proposed process, and add comments to the issue as to what you think, that would be great! Suggestions definitely welcome! [note: htaccess login is drupal/drupal for those links]
And we will be getting started on translations soon... in a few weeks probably.
Drupal programmer - http://poplarware.com
Drupal author - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920034612.do
Drupal contributor - https://www.drupal.org/u/jhodgdon