How to contribute translations

Question

G'morning!
If you feel up to translating the official documentation of Arch Linux into a yet uncovered language, I'd love to hear from you and help if there are any questions. To simply get started without further babble, you should head over to http://archlinux.veloxis.de/official/ and grab the latest and greatest LaTeX source package from there on which you can and should base your translation on. It's quite easy to handle, even if you never used TeX or LaTeX before, and the scripts you need to generate HTML and ASCII from the sources are included as courtesy copies.
Don't wait, start working on your translation today and make sure you post what you're working on so others don't reinvent the wheel at the same time.
Thanks,
  Dennis

Answer 1

Wonderful! That's quite a bit of languages already!
As Mork pointed out, there needs to be some sort of central changelog to make sure every translator is kept up to date. As all this organisational stuff is still in the works, I cannot yet tell you how it's gonna work out, but orelien suggested putting the docs into the CVS, which sounds like a very good idea to me. Combined with a mailing list, this is probably optimal. Until something specific is worked out, though, I'd say don't care too much about getting the latest version of the docs right now. I'll make sure that the "Changes" section in the documentation itself reflects all changes I made, so you can easily catch up when you find the time to update your translations. Additionally, I won't update the docs more often than, say, once a week unless something is so utterly, critically wrong that it needs to be fixed right away, which should offer plenty of time to integrate the changes into the translations and maybe even allow for a sort of fixed update schedule. We'll see how that works out and adapt when it sucks.
So, right now you might want to simply send me an email ([email protected]) if you want to be notified of any changes to the documentation, and I'll take care that you will stay right up to date. That should do until we've got something better.
Thanks,
  Dennis