Instructions for translators

[yevhenmazur]

I planned to translate the manual into my native language, but I'm confused a little bit... I don't understand how to make it properly in order to not to break anything in online or offline documentation.
Could you provide instructions for translators like you have provided it for regular contributors?

[Abbe98]

As far as I know mapper-manual translations isn't supported.

Translating the manual is a heavy task, it won't be common anytime soon.

[dg0yt]

To be honest, there is no infrastructure at the moment for translating the manual. The best you can do for now is:

• fork the mapper-manual repository,
• rewrite the pages,
• replace the screenshots in pages/images.

If you keep the basic structure as is, it should be okay. I can review the result. I will need to find out how it can be integrated to the program and maybe maintained as part of the mapper-manual. Maybe I will subtree-merge this fork into pages-ru.

[yevhenmazur]

Ok. Thanks. I'll do it so.

[krticka]

Not for the first time I am facing the following problem: the older mappers who switched to digital mapping and Mapper don't know English well and it can be big problem for them to discover all functionality in Mapper. Than they are asking me for help, usually with trivial things.
The best solution I think is rework current system of manual to allow translations via Weblate.

[dg0yt]

There are examples of using Weblate for translating manuals, e.g. https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/debian-handbook/. Also for Mapper, I would prefer to keep this outside of the "Mapper" component at Weblate, so that translators may prioritize more easily.

The manual has a lot of shortcomings even in its English form. Any improvements have to be done there first.

The effort in maintain splitting and merging of the pages should not be underestimated. An added value from good splitting could be achieved when populating the "What's this?" help feature with actual translated help texts, instead of just displaying the "Show more..." link.

[jmacura]

I believe that a translatable user manual is very needed and crucial thing. As @krticka stated, some mappers who are switching to digital mapping (or newbies learning already in the digital manner) can be both bad English-speakers and anti-technicists.
If it's not possible in the current state of things to make the user-manual translatable, I will probably write my own in Czech from scratch, but it seems to me like an unnecessary duplicating of things...
Thanks.