Guide to Translating www.gnu.org Web Pages

Table of Contents

• General Guide
• Two-letter Language Codes
• What to Translate
• Linking Other Documents
• Translations into Other Languages
• Filenames
• Tools to Help Translators
• Keeping Translations Current
• Translations Underway
• Final Notes

General Guide

• Before doing anything, read both
  • the Guidelines for GNU Web Site Volunteers,
  • the FSF HTML Style Sheet, http://www.gnu.org/server/fsf-html-style-sheet.html
• After reading this page, refer to the Translations Underway list, and check if there is already a team formed for the language you want to translate to. If not, contact web-trans@gnu.org, and ask if you can start a new team for your language.

Two-letter Language Codes

• RFC 1766 describes what two-letter language codes are allowed. ISO 639 gives the two-letter language codes in it's 2nd column. Later versions of RFC 1766 and ISO 639 may exist.
• If ISO 639 does not have a code, do some research and find out the right one to use. ISO 3166 gives the codes for countries. Language and country codes do not have to be the same. It is a mistake to assume a country code can be substituted for a language code - unless you verify it against a standard.

What to Translate

• Documents under /home/www/html/ should be converted together with their "glue pages", such as home.html and philosophy/philosophy.html.
• Don't translate anything under these directories:

  /home/www/html/software/

  We leave that area up to each maintainer. But if you want to help a maintainer do translations, ask hir (him or her).

  /home/www/html/brave-gnu-world/

  Here's how to help translate Brave GNU World.

  When translating "GNU's Not Unix," please ensure that the translation remains recursive. If a recursive translation cannot be conceived, use the following format: "GNU's Not Unix" (GNU är inte Unix).

Linking Other Documents

• All links are relative to the web server root, meaning that they should link to, for example, /software/software.html and not just software.html.
• Link should be made pointing to a translated page if it exists, else made pointing to the English original. You should NOT make links that depend upon content negotiation. One reason is that they will fail on mirror servers that do not do content negotiation.

Translations into Other Languages

• The top and bottom of all translations (including the English original) should contain links to other translations of the document when such exists. See the http://www.gnu.org/boilerplate.html for an example on how to do this.

Filenames

• Translations should be named PAGENAME.LG.html where LG is the two-letter language code. For example, a German translation of home.html should be named home.de.html.
• There exists a symlink index.html pointing to some other file other.html. Create a symlink named index.LG.html pointing to the correct translation other.LG.html.

Tools to Help Translators

• A file TAGS.LG in directory ~www/html/ lists all the HTML files translated into language LG. These files allow one to search or query replace all of the HTML files for a language code LG. See these instructions for more information.

Keeping Translations Current

• For all translations to be kept current, you should ask the Translations Manager, <web-trans@gnu.org> to subscribe you to the diffmon-web mailinglist. Then you will get sent one email for each page that is modified under /home/www/html. The traffic is around 4-5 mails per day, more on weekends. It's suggested that you save all such email and burst through them about once a week to make sure the translations are current.

Translations Underway

• ?? - This place is reserved for your name, when you form a translation team for another language.
• !! - Contact the current Translations Manager: Luis M. Arteaga <web-trans@gnu.org> if you would like to form a Translation Team.
• bs - Bosnian (Alen Sarkinovic <alen@linux.org.ba>)
• ca - Catalan (Joan Planas <joan-planas@teleline.es>)
• zh - Chinese (Chao-Hong Liu <chstoneliu@yahoo.com>)
• cs - Czech (Eva Frantova <eva.frantova@seznam.cz>)
• de - German (Guido Arnold <guido@gnu.org>
• es - Spanish (Luis Bustamante, Spanish translation team)
• fr - French (Karl Pradene <pradene@gnu.org>)
• gl - Galician (Javier Bahíllo Cabral <javierbahillo@latinmail.com>)
• hr - Croatian (Josip Rodin <jrodin@jagor.srce.hr>)
• eo - Esperanto (Johan Svenonius <johan@svenonius.com>)
• he - Hebrew (Dov Margulis <dov@gnu.org>, Hebrew translation team
• hu - Hungarian (Csillag Kristof <fenwick@freemail.hu>)
• id - Indonesian (Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim,Indonesian translation team)
• it - Italian (Giorgio V. Felchero and Paola Blason <bfteam@gnu.org>,Italian translation team)
• ja - Japanese (Masayuki Hatta <masayuki-h@geocities.co.jp>)
• ko - Korean (Lee Jung-hoon <renitz@gnu.org>, Korean translation team)
• pl - Polish (Sergiusz Pawlowicz <ser@metalab.unc.edu>)
• pt - Portuguese (Fernando Lozano <fernando@lozano.eti.br>,Portuguese translation team)
• ro - Romanian (Laurentiu Buzdugan <buzdugan at voyager dot net>
• ru - Russian (Nodir Gulyamov <gelios2000@yahoo.com>)
• sv - Swedish (Pål Brattberg <pal@eminds.se>)
• tr - Turkish (Emrah Cevik <ecevik@alumni.princeton.edu>)

• nl - Dutch
• no - Norwegian

• en - English

Final Notes

<link rev="translated" href-"mailto:web-translators-es@gnu.org" />