Translator's Guide

Technical tricks and hints

LinuxFocus articles come in 2 formats. The final article which is called something like articleXXX.shtml. This is a machine generated file. Do not edit it! You should use a file called articleXXX.meta.shtml. The articleXXX.meta.shtml has a very clear structure and is easier to read. The final article will be generated from the meta.shtml.
A note for Mozilla, Firefox and Netscape-7 users: When you download a page for translation and you use File->Save page as..., then select in the dialog box "Files of type: Html only" and not "Files of type: complete". Using "complete" modifies the page source code!. If you have some kind of translation page where people can get the articles then please add this note to warn people.
We recommend to edit your articles with a plain text editor. In other words work on HTML level and leave the original HTML Tags (The stuff that looks like <xxxxx>) unchanged. The HTML Tags must not be removed.
There are editors that support HTML syntax highlighting which makes the whole editing much easier. Examples of such editors are: kate (from KDE), emacs, vim, nedit.
If you do not have such an editor and your file-manager determines the application for editing by looking at the file extension, then rename the file first. If you e.g. rename articleXXX.meta.shtml to articleXXX.meta.txt then the file-manager will think that this is a text file (plain textfile is what you want unless you have one of the more advanced editors mentioned above).
LinuxFocus meta files start at the beginning with some keyword which are used for formatting: <H4>ArticleCategory:</H4>, <H4>AuthorImage:</H4>, <H4>TranslationInfo:</H4> , <H4>AboutTheAuthor:</H4>, <H4>Abstract:</H4>, <H4>ArticleIllustration:</H4>, <H4>ArticleBody:</H4>
Do not try to translate them or change anything after those lines. The only exceptions are the text after (after !): AboutTheAuthor and Abstract.

The actual article text comes after a keyword called <h4>ArticleBody:</h4>.
You can add your name and e-mail address (or homepage) to the article. That way the reader will be able to see who did all the hard work. Add at the end of the "TranslationInfo:" chapter something like:
<p>en to LANG <a href= "mailto:your@e-mail">Your Name</a></p>

or spam proof:

<p>en to LANG <a href= "mailto:your(at)e-mail">Your Name</a></p>

or with homepage:

<p>en to LANG <a href= "http://my.best.page">Your Name</a></p>

Replace LANG with the international country code abbreviation for the language. For French this is e.g "fr", German "de", Spanish "es",...
Translation takes time! Start immediately and work everyday on a few paragraphs.
When you are ready you should compress your article before you attach it to a mail and send it to the editor of your language. This is to avoid that some mail programs try to be smart and format the attachment or modify the character set. To compress article123.meta.html with gzip do the following:
```
gzip article123.meta.html
```
This creates the file article123.meta.html.gz. Attach article123.meta.html.gz to the mail.
You can also use other compression programs such as bzip2 or zip.

Style and Language

Translate as close as possible the original text but do not translate word by word. It is better if you read first the sentence and then translate the meaning.
Keywords and command names or labels on graphical applications.
Do not translate them. The user who wants to try out the program will not be able to find the items if you translate them. This is similar to the name of a person. If your name is "John Miller" and you come to Germany it will not change. If people would start to call you "Hans Müller", then you would probably not know what they mean.

For some graphical applications it is possible to localize them. It would however require that you have a localized version available to check how the name of a button has been translated. Usually you will not have the application. Therefore the recommended strategy is to not translate if you are in doubt. If the label name or keyword has a meaning a good solution can be to write the translation in braces like this:
Open (öffnen).

Never ever translate program code or shell commands. Don't translate anything in program examples.

Thanks for you time and effort!