Guide to Translating www.gnu.org Web Pages

[ English | Indonesian ]

General Guide

Before doing anything, read both
- the Guidelines for GNU Web Site Volunteers,
- the FSF HTML Style Sheet, http://www.gnu.org/server/fsf-html-style-sheet.html
If you translate a page for www.gnu.org, please insert the following tag, in the <HEAD> . . . </HEAD> section, where web-translators-es@www.gnu.org is the forwarding address @www.gnu.org for your translations team:
<LINK REV="translated" HREF="mailto:web-translators-es@www.gnu.org">

Two-letter Language Codes

RFC 1766 describes what two-letter language codes are allowed. ISO 639 gives the two-letter language codes in it's 2nd half. Later versions of RFC 1766 and ISO 639 may exist.
If ISO 639 does not have a code, do some research and find out the right one to use. ISO 3166 gives the codes for countries. Language and country codes do not have to be the same. It is a mistake to assume a country code can be substituted for a language code - unless you verify it against a standard.

What to Translate

Documents under /home/www/html/ should be converted together with their "glue pages", such as home.html and philosophy/philosophy.html.
Don't translate anything under these directories:

/home/www/html/software/
We leave that area up to each maintainer. But if you want to help a maintainer do translations, ask hir (him or her).
/home/www/html/brave-gnu-world/
Here's how to help translate Brave GNU World.

Linking Other Documents

All links are relative to the web server root, meaning that they should link to, for example, /software/software.html and not just software.html.
Link should be made pointing to a translated page if it exists, else made pointing to the English original. You should NOT make links that depend upon content negotiation. One reason is that they will fail on mirror servers that do not do content negotiation.

Translations into Other Languages

The top and bottom of all translations (including the English original) should contain links to other translations of the document when such exists. See the http://www.gnu.org/boilerplate.html for an example on how to do this.

Filenames

Translations should be named PAGENAME.LG.html where LG is the two-letter language code. For example, a German translation of home.html should be named home.de.html.
There exists a symlink index.html pointing to some other file other.html. Create a symlink named index.LG.html pointing to the correct translation other.LG.html.

Tools to Help Translators

A file TAGS.LG in directory ~www/html/ lists all the HTML files translated into language LG. These files allow one to search or query replace all of the HTML files for a language code LG. See these instructions for more information.

Keeping Translations Current

For all translations to be kept current, you should ask the <webmasters@gnu.org> to subscribe you to the diffmon-web mailinglist. Then you will get sent one email for each page that is modified under /home/www/html. The traffic is around 4-5 mails per day, more on weekends. It's suggested that you save all such email and burst through them about once a week to make sure the translations are current.

Translations Underway

The two-letter language code is followed by the name of the language, and the name and e-mail address of the translation team leader.
Translation Teams:

?? - This place is reserved for your name, when you form a translation team for another language.
!! - Contact <webmasters@gnu.org> if you would like to form a Translation Team.
ca - Catalan (David Rodriguez <drodriguezb@wanadoo.es>)
cs - Czech (Eva Frantova <eva.frantova@seznam.cz>)
es - Spanish (Holman Romero <hromero@gnu.org> Mailing list subscription )
fr - French (Karl Pradene <pradene@gnu.org>)
gl - Galician (Javier Bahíllo Cabral <javierbahillo@latinmail.com>)
hr - Croatian (Josip Rodin <jrodin@jagor.srce.hr>)
hu - Hungarian (Csillag Kristof <csillagk@yahoo.com>)
id - Indonesian (Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim <rms46-trans-01@vlsm.org>)
it - Italian (Giorgio V. Felchero and Paola Blason <bfteam@gnu.org>, Italian translation team)
ja - Japanese (Masayuki Hatta <masayuki-h@geocities.co.jp>)
ko - Korean (Song Chang Hun <chsong@gnu.org>, Korean translation team)
pl - Polish (Sergiusz Pawlowicz <ser@metalab.unc.edu>)
pt - Portuguese (Fernando Lozano <fsl@centroin.com.br>)
tr - Turkish (Emrah Cevik <ecevik@alumni.princeton.edu>)
ru - Russian (Nodir Gulyamov <gelios2000@yahoo.com>)
sv - Swedish (Pål Brattberg <pal@eminds.se>)

There are no Translation Team for these languages yet, though files are translated into each language. Contact <webmasters@gnu.org> if you would like to form a Translation Team.

de - German
nl - Dutch
no - Norwegian
zh - Chinese

Note that

en - English

is a special case. The bulk of the site is written in English, which is the de-facto language of the GNU Project. We occasionally need original documents written in other languages translated into English. If you can help with this, please contact <webmasters@gnu.org>.

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Updated: $Date: 2001/10/09 11:30:57 $ $Author: lmiguel $

Guide to Translating www.gnu.org Web Pages

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