Translating web pages

Understanding how the web pages are built

The web pages of www.fsfeurope.org are maintaned as a set of XML files. The web server generates the HTML pages from these XML files automatically every five minutes. Consequently, all editing of the pages is done in the XML files, and the HTML is never edited directly.

Every page on www.fsfeurope.org is named "pagename.language.html" (language being the 2-letter iso-639 code of the language, like "en" for English or "de" for German). The source files are named "pagename.language.xhtml".
Some pages have a dynamic part: apart from the fixed texts taken from the .xhtml file, they include information from one or several .xml files. Whenever such a page is built, the build system takes the translated .xml files where available, and falls back to the English version of those .xml files that have not yet been translated. This way, such pages can end up with parts of the text being translated and other parts still showing in English. Examples of such pages include the start page, the news page, and the events page.

Everybody can contribute translations

All source files (i.e. all .xhtml and .xml files) are publicly available for download, so everybody can spontaneously contribute a translation without having to register anywhere. However, whenever you start a translation and expect it to take longer, please write a short note to the Translators mailing list to avoid that somebody else starts to work on the same text simultaneously.

Contributing missing translations

If you have a page open in your web browser that has not yet been translated to your language, scroll to the end of the page, click on the "[XHTML]" link and save the file you get there. You will get the English .xhtml file. Rename the file to carry your language code instead of the "en" code, and open it in a text editor. Now, translate all text in the file that is outside the "<...>" marks; do not change anything inside these marks (the text inside the marks are XHTML commands that influence the appearance of the resulting web page).

At the end of the file there will by a line saying "</html>". Immediately above this line, add a line saying "<translator>your name</translator>".

When you are done, send the translated file to the Translators mailing list. Other members of this list can proofread the translation, and somebody on that list will ultimately post it to the server.

Updating outdated translations

If you have a page open in your web browser of which the translation is outdated (indicated by a note at the top of the page), scroll to the end of the page, click on the "[XHTML]" link and save the file you get there. This file is the (outdated) translated version. Next, use the "English" link at the top of the page to jump to the English version of the page and click on the "[XHTML]" link there, too. The file you get there is the (up to date) English version. Now you can compare both files and update the translation. Please notice that everything inside the "<...>" marks may not be translated.

When you are done, send the translated file to the Translators mailing list. Other members of this list can proofread the translation, and somebody on that list will ultimately post it to the server.

Finding out what needs work

There is an autogenerated list of all languages available. On that page, each language code is a link to a separate page that lists all outdated and missing translations for that language.

The list of outdated translations provides an extra feature helpful for updating: you can not only downlad the (outdated) translated file and the (up to date) English original; you can also view the changelog of both files, a protocol of all modifications done to the respective file. Comparing the two changelogs usually makes it easy to find out which parts of the original were altered since the translation was last updated.

This translation status page is also the only way to download the .xml files that are built into the dynamic pages, like files containing news items or event entries.

Downloading the complete source file tree with CVS

If it is possible for you to use CVS, you can also download the complete source file tree at once.

Create a directory in which you want to store the files, change into that directory and issue the command
$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/web/fsfe co .
When you are asked for a password, just hit the Return key.

To update a source tree you previously downloaded that way, you can use the command
$ cvs -z3 update -Pd

Joining the www.fsfeurope.org webmasters

If you intend to contribute translations regularly and have some basic understanding of CVS and SSH, you are invited to join the webmaster team.

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