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2.6. Translation Guidelines

Last updated on
11 January 2024

Note: This is a rough draft still!

  • When translating, follow the standard glossary of terminology translations that your language team has set up for the User Guide, so that consistency is maintained across the entire book.
  • You may feel free to communicate on translation issues for the User Guide either in English, or in the language you are translating into.
  • Be careful not to change any AsciiDoc formatting. See Section 1.2, “Formatting Your Text” for details.

  • Be careful not to change any IDs — these should stay in English (they are not visible to the reader). IDs come in two places/types:

    • The topic ID at the top of each topic file, which looks like [[id-goes-here]].
    • Topic IDs used in cross-links, which look like either <<id-goes-here>> without link text, and <<id-goes-here,overridden link text>>. In the second format, you should translate the overridden link text, but not the ID.
  • Be careful not to change any image file names, for embedded images. The image embedding lines look like: image:images/spreadsheet.png["Screen shot of the tracking spreadsheet",width="100%"] You will need to translate the "alt" text, such as (in this example) "Screen shot of the tracking spreadsheet".

  • Be sure to look at the images carefully and note on your issue if there are any problems, such as:

    • Bad cropping (too much white space or important things cut off)
    • Bad magnification on the page
    • Untranslated English text that should be in your language
    • Text entered in forms in the image that doesn’t match the instructions
  • If there is a Glossary topic, you will need to re-alphabetize it after translating the terms and definitions.
  • The Index will automatically be re-alphabetized, but you will need to translate index entries. These are located at the top of each topic, and look like (((Main entry,secondary entry))).
  • Additional references section in some topics: This section is for links to outside references, and most or all are in English. Translators will need to replace the references with references in their language if possible. If you are not able to find reference links in your language, and feel that the English references are still useful to include (or want to include references in a third language), make sure to include a note with each reference that is not in the language you are translated into. For instance, it might say: 
https://www.drupal.org/documentation/modules/block[_Drupal.org_ community
documentation page "Working with blocks (content in regions)" (in English)]
  • Attributions information: There may be attributions information at the bottom of topic files, as well as in a book-wide attributions.txt file. When translating attributions information, do not translate people’s names, URLs, or company names. Your language version of the book will also need to have additional attributions added for the translation team for your language.

Attributions

Written/edited by Jennifer Hodgdon and Joe Shindelar.

 

This page is generated from AsciiDoc source from the User Guide. To propose a change, edit the source and attach the file to a new issue in the User Guide project.

Source file: guidelines-translating.asciidoc

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