I just saw Chris Lattners tweet about the translation section of the Swift
Documentation page <https://swift.org/documentation/>.
The idea to encourage community driven translations into other languages is
great.
But getting multiple people to collaborate on a single translation language
requires some sort of collaboration platform.
For the Chinese translation this is GitHub. It’s only natural to follow this
example for other languages. We’re developers after all and GitHub is where the
rest of the Swift project is hosted.
I’d recommend pushing the English ebook to GitHub as well.
Think about future releases of Swift. As the language evolves, so will the
book.
The only way the maintainer of a translation can accommodate these changes, is
if he knows what they are.
For a German translation, I’d include a file with the latest commit hash (or
submodule reference) of the english book repo that my translation is based on.
Then when the English version is updated, all I need to do is to diff its
current master against the commit hash. This will allow me to see if any of the
changes are relevant to my translation.
When there is a git repo for the base language that can be forked as a starting
point, this also encourages people to keep the original structure intact.
Translations would also result in an epub file with the same style and format
as the original. This would give them a more uniform look and allows for a
central list that offers epub downloads for the various languages. People could
also more easily jump between the english and their native language version of
the book.
A benefit on the side: Why not accept community contributions on the English
version of the book as well?
However, using git is not the only thing to take away from the Chinese
translation project:
They converted everything to Markdown. Having a format that is easy to edit
directly, and more importantly very easy to diff, is key to making
community-based translations a success.
ePubs just being a zip file of html files are not a bad format, but something
like Pandoc (http://pandoc.org/epub.html) would be better in my opinion.
What tool did Apple use internally to make the book? Do you have any other
source files that you could provide?
Otherwise, just dumping the unzipped epub to GitHub would already help a lot.
Cheers,
Tim
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