F11 release notes ready for translation

Ruediger Landmann r.landmann at redhat.com
Sat Apr 11 20:57:41 UTC 2009


Paul W. Frields wrote:
> The people who are editing release notes need to be aware of the needs
> of translators, and make sure that the English used in the release
> notes is simple enough to be understood by all readers, and translated
> by all translators.
>   
Absolutely; this is something that every technical writer needs to 
remain aware of constantly. Although sadly none of us are perfect, we 
generally love to receive feedback from readers that helps us to 
improve! :)

One of the translators who works in the same office as me likes to point 
out that probably nobody else will ever read our work as closely and as 
thoroughly as the translators do; and of course, she is right. So 
feedback from the localisation teams is especially valuable to us -- we 
know that you have read every word!

If there's a problem with a document or a section of a document, the 
writers need to know about it, so the feedback in this thread is really 
great. Also please remember that the most specific feedback is the most 
useful, so the examples that Piotr included in his original post are 
very helpful. If you have criticisms that you think are too specific to 
post to a whole mailing list, then you could send comments directly to 
the particular writer. If you don't know which writer was responsible 
for a particular document or section, just ask on fedora-docs-list or on 
the #fedora-docs channel.

When draft documentation is complete, we writers generally make it 
available for review and comment by other writers and by developers. In 
future, when I make drafts of Fedora docs available, I will be sure to 
alert fedora-trans-list as well. Criticism received before string freeze 
is always going to be more valuable than criticism afterwards :)

On that subject, I'd like to invite translators to look at the draft 
version of the Fedora 11 Installation Guide here -- 
http://rlandmann.fedorapeople.org/Installation%20Guide/ (as I write 
this, it's only available in English, but I plan to make other languages 
available later today). Unfortunately, this is very late notice this 
time: there are only 48 hours left before we have to freeze the document 
and hand it over to you. It's therefore unlikely that big changes will 
be possible, but any and all feedback is very welcome if it makes the 
Fedora 12 version of the guide better, and anything that I can 
realistically fix in the next two days for Fedora 11, I will take care 
of as well.

Cheers
Ruediger






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