Made with Creative Commons (Spanish translation): Copyedits done!
Uff! Remember almost two years ago I announced on this same blog I would start coordinating a translation effort for the (excellent!) Made with Creative Commons book into Spanish? Having made the vey wise decision to choose Weblate as our translation platform, only four months later and with the collaboration from people all over Latin America, we amazingly reached 100% translated strings only four months later! Not only that — other languages were also started, and Norwegian (coordinated by Petter Reinholdtsen) also reached 100%.
But editting a book is not just a matter of translating it. In my case, as I publish via the National University, the translation had to undergo peer review –as any university-published book would– which took several months (!) Once we got academic approval for the University to host the edition, resources were approved for our editors to do the style correction reading. And, of course, being us so diverse geographically, our linguistic styles were really not coherent. Some ideological issues appear in the resulting text, which also becomes easily aparent. Plus, not all of us are in the habit of writing — And it also shows.
So, the copyediting process was long and painful for our readers and for me, who incorporated their comments into the source. Oh — Eat your own dogfood: Given we did our translation based on a nice and nifty gettext+DocBook environment… Well, gettext is meant for programming, not for whole texts. I basically did all the copyediting by opening the .po file as plain text. Surprisingly, I broke things very few times!
The process still has many stops in the horizon. But at least I already finished a huge chunk of the pending work. I am happy! ☺
Attachments
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Comments
Andrej Shadura 2019-05-09 00:10:00
Next time you decide to
Next time you decide to translate a book, you may want to consider OmegaT, which is now available in Debian: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/omegat
It is much better than PO tools for translating texts, and with a good translation memory it helps you progress through the text very quickly. Martina was translating a GDPR-related text, using the EU-Lex official translation of the regulation as the translation memory, and it helped her quickly get most of the 12 page text translated within a couple of hours.