Hi there, As previously announced [1] we were not in time this release to allow translations of Ubuntu desktop help to take place prior to the release.
Very significant progress has now been made on the help and it is in a state where translation can start. We have not yet got to the stage of making a hard string freeze but we have got far enough that it is appropriate for translators to commence the work of translating this package. We intend to make a hard string freeze in a couple of weeks. Then, we will make several releases over the course of the cycle to update translations. These would be intended to coincide with the language pack updates, because help translations are contained in the language packs. The Ubuntu onboard help is mainly contained in the gnome-user-docs package in natty, with ubuntu-docs only containing help for the fallback "Ubuntu Classic" desktop. I therefore suggest that you focus on translating the gnome-user-docs package [2]. Within that, you should focus on the gnome-help template. The other template (user-guide) is only used by very few applications for their help pages. The gnome-help template is the important one because that is what appears in the front page of yelp. This template reuses *some* strings from upstream Gnome, although many many strings have been changed. It may be worth you uploading po files from upstream for your language if work has been going on there to translate gnome-user-docs, so that the translations of any common strings will be reused. Let's be honest - this is a very large job. There are over 2500 strings. We will commit to doing regular updates and reusing the translations in future releases for this reason. Please note: this is translation of xml. Please read carefully the first three guidelines in the "For Translators" section here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/Translation Failure to observe these guidelines could result in your translated help files being invalid. We won't have the opportunity to test and fix any errors in translated help files. You can however do so yourselves by getting the bzr branch for the package (lp:~ubuntu-core-doc/gnome-user-docs/natty), importing the po files into the relevant directory and testing the files using the gnome-doc-utils build tools. Please note (2): there are various screenshots used in the gnome-help files. These are contained in the gnome-help/C/figures directory in the source. Please submit any translated screenshots by creating a bzr branch for your language and proposing a merge into lp:~ubuntu-core-doc/gnome-user-docs/natty. Translated screenshots should go in gnome-help/LANG/figures. I will try to update our translation wiki page with a guide to how to test translations and submit screenshots over the coming days. Please feel free to ask here if you have any questions about translation of this package. [1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-translators/2011-April/004675.html [2] https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/natty/+source/gnome-user-docs -- Matthew East http://www.mdke.org gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF -- ubuntu-translators mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-translators
