Re: Translation of Emacs Info manuals

[Katsumi Yamaoka <yamaoka@jpl.org>]

> On Tue, Jul 24 2007, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> If translators volunteer to translate the user manual (a formidable
>> job, if you ask me, since the manual is HUGE), there should be no
>> problem at all to display a localized manual, too.

>>>>> Reiner Steib wrote:

> On <http://www.jpl.org/gnus-doc-ja.html>, Katsumi Yamaoka (Cc-ed)
> provides Japanese translations of all Gnus related Info manuals:

>   emacs-mime-ja gnus-coding-ja gnus-ja message-ja pgg-ja sasl-ja sieve-ja

> If we can get assignments for these (I'm not sure if he has done all
> the translation himself), it might be a start to add those to Emacs.

It can be a formidable job, too.  The main problem is that
the whereabouts of at least a certain author who worked in early
days is now unknown.  (And even if I can contact him, the companies
in Japan that employ him and other authors might grudge issuing
a disclaimer.)  Anyway I'm going to try contacting the authors.

The Japanese translation of the Gnus manual was first made by
Kazuyuki Ienaga with Gnus v5.0.15, and Yoshiki Hayashi and
Keisuke Mori upgraded it for Semi-gnus afterward.  I and Hiroyuki
Nakaji made it be for No Gnus again.

> It would be interesting to know how much work it was and what were the
> major difficulties.  (The Gnus manual is (roundabout) half of the size
> of the Emacs manual.)

It took about four months first to read through the English
version, compare it with the existing Japanese version, correct
it, add new translations, and sometimes fix the original and
the Lisp source.   If it was made from scratch, it might have
taken a year or more.  People who wish to make a new translation,
in Chinese for example, will probably need to be skillful in Gnus
and Emacs Lisp to understand what Lars meant in the manual.
Since I don't necessarily know all about Gnus, I frequently read
the source code while translating the manual.  But it was not a
boring work because Lars is a very good writer.  His work sparkled
with wit and was humorous, though some clueless expressions
annoyed me.  (I went to the library to ask for the Japanese
translations of Edgar Allan Poe's and Charles Reznikoff's works.)

> [ Should we shift this to emacs-devel? ]

Well, please do so if it is not a mater that devel is not open
to Usenet.